Monday, November 18, 2013

Why not cast out the demon of homophobia?

.    I pause whenever the subject of the Catholic Church comes up and ask myself the old World War II question: "Is this trip necessary?" Because, to be honest, you get a lot of grief, from Opus Dei sorts who collapse into a heap of quivering offense, condemning me for hating Catholics and lashing out at their faith by questioning their right to tell non-Catholics how to live their lives. But to do otherwise is to yield the field to them, and I'm not going to do that. It's a dirty, thankless job, but somebody has got to do it.

     The good news out of China is that the Communist Party, having looked around at the 21st century for the past 13 years and suddenly felt a disconnect, announced Friday that, among other reforms, it is getting rid of forced labor camps to “re-educate” political prisoners and scaling back the one-child policy that prompted citizens to abandon their girl babies in the woods to die.
     Excellent. Congratulations guys.
     Meanwhile, another large, powerful entity, the Roman Catholic Church, is having a harder time adapting to this confusing blur we call the modern world. While its breath-of-fresh-air new Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis, has been issuing a series of bracingly human statements, as if religion were intended as a vehicle for compassion, bishops closer to home are not showing the kind of flexibility China somehow mustered.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki
     The news of the next few days is going to be owned by Thomas Paprocki, bishop of Springfield, who announced last week that he will hold an exorcism Wednesday to coincide with Gov. Pat Quinn's signing same-sex marriage into law in Illinois.
     "It is scandalous that so many Catholic politicians are responsible for enabling the passage of this legislation and even twisting the words of the pope to rationalize their actions despite the clear teaching of the church," Paprocki said in a statement. He explained that what Pope Francis really meant, rather than any tolerance for gays as fellow human beings deserving of basic civil rights such as marriage, was that same-sex marriage "comes from the devil."
     Give the man points for consistency. Paprocki is the same guy who, six years ago, said the inspiration behind sex-abuse lawsuits against the church is "none other than the devil." Prince of Darkness, Evil One, Source of Litigation. It does sound right.
     Perhaps chafing at being left out of the fun when gays are being bound to Satan's hooves and given the bum's rush out of church, our own Cardinal Francis George weighed in. He said that while being allowed to marry might make "some gays and lesbians happy, and that is not a bad thing in itself"— a startling admission from our flinty cardinal and, for him, the rhetorical equivalent of prancing down Broadway in a tiara and a Speedo on the last Sunday in June — then, recovering himself, continued, "the law, however, is bad law because it will contribute over the long run to the further dissolution of marriage and family life."
     That's a lie, or, to be charitable, an assertion based not on fact but on rancor, ill will that causes Paprocki to call the law "destructive of the plan of God." Just the opposite; it is hostility of prelates like these two that undermines families and dissolves marriages, or would if people were listening.
     Increasingly they're not. There is a harm here, and at some point the hurt being inflicted shifts from the traditional victim — the LGBT community — to the people doing the baseless slurring. In 1974, 47 percent of Catholics attended mass once a week, according to Pew Research. In 2012, it was almost exactly half that, 24 percent. Compare this to Protestant church attendance, which went up in that same period, from 29 percent to 38 percent.
    Exorcise that, fellows. And while we can't lay the blame entirely on intolerance of gays or marginalizing women — the endless sex-abuse scandal no doubt had a hand — the numbers still reflect what happens when you put a medieval doctrine above people.
     None of this is loving, none of this is ministering to souls. It is a mean, small, fearful gazing beneath the sheets — a church tradition, yes, but now clearly jamming their noses into realms where they never belonged and belong even less today.
     It should stop. Church die-hards will say that, unlike policy in communist China, we are not dealing with malleable rules but timeless moral codes. Pretty to think so. So was condemnation of divorce and premarital sex, which managed to move from venial sins to popular general pastimes despite the continuous disapproval of the church, which itself changes. Not a lot of thundering against divorce nowadays. The Latin mass got dumped, and limbo abolished ("I hope they promoted those babies up to heaven," George Carlin mused, "didn't just cut them loose into space.")
     If the Mormon God can change his mind about black people, I bet the Catholic God can do the same. Paprocki might consider directing that exorcism toward his own heart. He might be surprised at what demons fly out. Others sure wouldn't be surprised. Here's a hint: Expect horns, bat wings, hooves and a certain sulfurous smell.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

"Get off get off get off"—Chicago spread the shocking news from Dallas



     This started as a story about Chicago the day Kennedy was killed, but the more I found out about the UPI office here, the more that seemed the story to tell—given how familiar we are with the Kennedy assassination, it struck me as something that most people would not know about.


     Nov. 22, 1963, was a Friday. Unseasonably warm in Chicago, in the mid-60s, cloudy with light rain.
     There was plenty of news going on around the city. At the Municipal Court, Hugh Hefner was on trial for obscenity. Miss December sat in the gallery, in street clothes.
     At 9:30 a.m., the World’s Invitational Bowling Championship kicked off at McCormick Place. Members of the Bowling Proprietors Association of Greater Chicago proudly wore identical maroon sports coats made for the event.
     Not all news of interest to Chicagoans was happening in Chicago. Cassius Clay, “the punching poet,” was in New York for a broadcast of the Jack Paar show that put him in the ring with another flamboyant showman, Liberace.
     Longtime Sun-Times Washington correspondent Carleton Kent was in Texas, traveling with President John F. Kennedy, at a breakfast with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where its colorful president, Raymond Buck, “Mr. Fort Worth,” praised “our great, courageous and brilliant leader of the world’s strongest nation.”
     Kennedy then flew 30 miles away, to Love Field in Dallas. From there, his motorcade headed to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart. Kent, 54, but with hair that turned snow-white during one endless night on Guadalcanal in World War II, was in the press bus, following along at hundreds of yards behind the president’s blue 1961 Lincoln Continental limo. Unable to see ahead, he looked at the buildings, noticing signs in the windows: “Because of my respect for the Presidency, I despise you and your brand of socialism,” read one.
     His colleagues on the bus agreed that Kennedy probably laughed at that.
     Further ahead was Merriman Smith, of United Press International, a “reporter’s reporter.” He was in the front seat of the press pool car, on loan from the local Bell Telephone office because it had a radio-telephone. Two other newsmen were in the car, one Jack Bell of the Associated Press.
     “Suddenly we heard three loud, almost painfully loud cracks,” Smith later recalled. “The first sounded as if it might have been a large firecracker. But the second and third blasts were unmistakable. Gunfire.”
     After the shots echoed across Dealey Plaza, there was a tussle for the phone. Smith won. He grabbed the receiver and rolled under the dashboard, curled up dictating as Jack Bell beat him on the back with his fists.
  

   ‘Stay off all of you’
 

    Chicago was the headquarters of United Press International’s broadcast department, UPR. Step off the elevator at the fifth floor of the Apollo Savings & Loan building, 430 N. Michigan, and you would hear the teletypes, 100 machines in a row, a constant clattering “din-din-din” as they spat out news, at 62 words a minute, from bureaus across the country, plus an “A-wire” for national feeds, a B-wire for lesser news, a London wire. The UPI and UPR office had a staff of 22, ran in three shifts 24 hours a day, editing the news into readable prose and transmitting it to UPR’s 3,500 radio and TV subscribers.
     It was a smoky room of scattered coffee cups and take-out trash. At 12:30 p.m., Henry Renwald, a shortish, quiet teletype operator, flipped a switch, “splitting the line,” to allow regional offices to transmit nationally.
     At 12:34, five bells — hollow metallic dings — pinged, an “urgent,” as the A-wire clacked out the news that Smith had dictated into his phone to UPI’s Dallas office as the press car veered out of the motorcade and chased Kennedy’s car toward Parkland Hospital.
     “Hey look at this,” said Bill Roberts, second desk editor. He tore the sheet off and read, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”
     “Jesus Christ!” replied editor Larry Lorenz, a bespectacled Marquette English major.
     Stories were typed, creating holes in a pale yellow tape then fed into machines that sent it over Western Union lines. Renwald started to resend the news to his broadcast outlets, but Kansas City was transmitting a weather report:

(SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY (KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI) -- THE WEATHER BUREAU AT KANSAS CITY HAS ISSUED THE FOLLOWING SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY... HAZARDOUS T Z
     Chicago had the power to override the feed, and tried:
BULLETIN PRECEDE (KENNEDY
     But Kansas’ tape kept transmitting. Renwald typed “GET OFF GET OFF GET OFF” then sent:
B U L L E T I N(DALLAS)1--AN UNKNOWN SNIPER FIRED THREE SHOTS AT ...
     Meanwhile, the A-wire machine started ringing again: 10 bells this time. A “flash”— the most urgent code they had. Roberts brought him the copy:
FLASHKENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED -----
     New York tried to resend the news from Dallas, but Renwald warned them off: STAY OFF ALL OF YOU GET OFF.

     Here is a bulletin


     “As the World Turns” was broadcast live in Chicago on the CBS affiliate, WBBM Channel 2. At 12:40 p.m, the image shifted to a card reading “CBS News Bulletin” and the voice of Walter Cronkite read a report rewritten from the UPR’s Chicago feed:
     “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting. More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy, she called ‘Oh, no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News, President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
  

    Flash president dead

     At 1:30 p.m., Alice Guenther, took over the teletype keyboard at UPR Chicago. Four minutes later, official word from Dallas: The president was dead.
     UPR’s national news editor, John Pelletreu, a lean, hawk-eyed man with a small mustache, said, “Alice, type ‘Flash President Dead.’” Instead she raised her hands from the keyboard, covered her face and cried out, “Oh my God.”
     In one smooth motion, another operator lifted her by the elbows out of the chair, eased her, sobbing, onto the floor next to her desk, and sat down to type the words.
     Of course UPI was only one of several wire services — there was the Associated Press, Reuters. The news filled the newspapers — Chicago had four, the Sun-Times, its afternoon sister the Daily News, the Tribune and the American.
     The news spread, passed along by radio, TV, “Extra” editions, word of mouth. Chicagoans heard the news in their schools, homes, restaurants and experienced a surreal shock that would remain a vivid emotional wound for the rest of their lives.
     When Larry Lorenz got off work at UPR, he walked over to the Chicago Press Club for a drink, but a couple of advertising men at the end of the bar were complaining loudly about how their commercials had been yanked off the television. He couldn’t take that and left, walking south down Michigan to the Radio Grill, where he knew other UPI colleagues would be gathering.
     It was raining again. Lorenz started to cry, thinking, goddamn it. He was glad it was raining so nobody would see him. Newsmen weren’t supposed to cry.

Larry Lorenz’s online essay, “FLASH President Dead,” contributed to this story.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Reading aloud

'Virgil reading "The Aeneid" to Augustus, Octavia and Livia,"
by Jean Baptiste Joseph Wicar (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Should I be embarrassed to admit that I once read The Odyssey aloud to my wife?
     I am, a bit.
     Not sure why. It sounds so ... decadent. 
     And she permitted it. To be honest, it was so long ago — pre-children — that the only aspect I remember is explaining, "It's supposed to be read aloud." Actually, it's supposed to be memorized and recited. But that's asking a lot in the modern world.
     Trying to be thorough, checking, I see the copyright date for our edition is 1996. So the oldest boy, Ross, was around. I must have read it during our first year with a newborn. 
     No wonder I don't remember it.
     Afterward, I tended to read to him; the younger boy would hover nearby, but never took to it in the same way. They're different kids. 
     The plan had been to read Dickens. I distinctly remember, before he was born, hunting around used book stores for an attractive set of Dickens to read during what I imagined to be the endless expanse of enforced idleness and eternal vigilance of parenthood.
     I never found the right set.
     Which is just as well, because I'm no particular fan of Dickens.
     Instead, when Ross was small — say 2 — I seized what was at hand, a lovely red facsimile of the first edition of Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland books, and read those to him. They're heavy lifting for toddlers — not really children's books at all or, rather, books for Victorian children, who seem to have been a more patient and attentive lot. Didn't matter; Ross enjoyed them.
     And so did I. I want to be sure that I don't cast reading to him as some sort of parental sacrifice. It wasn't. I loved it. The ritual, getting ourselves settled, cracking the book to the place where we left off, the rhythm of reading, interrupted by questions, using different voices for the characters. I did a great Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter books, gruff and snarling, "Constant vigilance!"
     Loved it. That's pretty much true for the entire parenting process; I see that now that the boys are both setting themselves in a runner's crouch, in the blocks, waiting for the starting gun to leap up and race off into their own lives, college and careers. 
      I'm lucky that way. Parenthood is hard enough when you love it. But I like to talk and I like to read and I like to experience new things, activities all the more sweet when you have  someone to do them with.
     After Alice I and II, it was adventure books, at first: Treasure Island — the dialect made it hard to read — and the entire Harry Potter series, several times, because each time a new one came out we'd go back and read them again. I had resisted, assumed that anything that popular had to be crap. But they really are wonderful books, and it was a thrill to be a parent of young children while they were being written. 
 
Reading 'The Odyssey,' summer 2005.
   As he got older, we turned classical. Seamus Heany's excellent Beowulf. Then the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid—the beautiful translations of Robert Fagles. Homer's tales are more simple, pure and true. But something about Virgil, he just packs more drama into his re-hash. There's no Trojan horse in Homer, [not true, as sharp-eyed reader Tricia Kessie of Glenview points out; in Book 8 of The Odyssey, during the song competition, the harper sings of the wooden horse, briefly] no Queen Dido, those are Virgil's additions. It's slicker, more polished, which is good and bad. Homer is to The Aeneid as Moby-Dick would be to a novel George W. Bush asked John Irving to write recasting Moby-Dick in order to better  promote New England tourism.

     As Ross got older, we got more complicated. He picked Dante's Inferno, the Robert Pinsky translation, off my office shelves -- I never would have picked it myself. I had read it when I was 35, didn't think much of it. I argued, but he persisted, as he tends to do, and I shrugged and went along -- we began reading it on the shores of Lake Michigan, at a friend's place in Michigan City. 
     The book had done little for me before, but when I was 46, however, having been through the mill, my outlook had changed, and I liked it immensely, as did he. So much so that he insisted we read Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso, the second and third volumes of the trilogy. If I said we had some wonderful laughs reading those, would you believe me? We did. Beatrice is such a scold. 
     We only abandoned two -- Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It was so bleak, so psychological. We just ran out of steam, cast the book aside. I almost suggested Lord Jim, but that's a slog, with more homoerotic overtones than I felt like delving into. I guess we also quit Remembrance of Things Past, but so early on, probably within 15 minutes, that it hardly counts. Not because it was dull, I believe. The length daunted him. 
     I wanted to read Don Quixote, because I never have. But he nixed that idea. For the past ... gee... three or four or five years, it's been Tolstoy's War and Peace, a vivid translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I liked that it included the French; 3 percent of the novel is in French, with the Russian aristocrats would speak. I'd read the French and then translate, which was good for him, because he's studying it.
     The secret about War and Peace is it's not boring; it's thrilling. It's the original romance novel: with war and, umm, peace, love, plus cameos by famous characters. When a horse comes snorting and foaming and sidestepping into a scene, you are reminded that Tolstoy had a farm, and knew horses.
      We would have finished it long ago, but the pattern was for me to read to him before he went to bed, and for the longest time he stays up later than me.
     But we're nearly done -- some 30 pages from the end. It seems like we've been 30 pages from the end for a year, if not two. True, the characters fade from view as Tolstoy prattles on about history and the book falls apart at the end. Rather like Tolstoy himself. Maybe I'm  rationalizing mediocrity, but it's hard to feel bad about not being Tolstoy once you realize how little being Tolstoy did for Tolstoy himself. 
     A psychologist would suggest that Ross and I don't want to finish it, neither wanting to close the door on that part of our lives. But that would be romanticizing. The truth is, he never thinks of it at all. I do, spying the thick, dog-eared volume on the coffee table shelf, and I think: Finish the damn book.
     Friday night, at dinner, he had the new New Yorker next to his plate. He never opened it, but I could tell he was eyeing it, he wanted to. "We should be able to read at dinner," he said. 
    "It's rude," my wife said.
    "Hey," I interjected, sensing an opening. "We've got to finish War and Peace."
    "Before I go to college," he promised.
     So that gives us nine months. I'll hold him to that. I do want to finish it, again. It seems only right. Even knowing that when we're done, we'll never read another book together again. Or if we do, it will be him reading to me next time. 

Friday, November 15, 2013

'Babywearing' warm and fuzzy fun until somebody gets hurt

    A newspaper is a dialogue, a chorus of voices conveying and commenting upon the news of the day.
     So I am not correcting a Thursday story in the Splash pages — “That’s a wrap” about “wearable baby carriers” — as much as continuing the conversation, elaborating on some caveats that were online but, alas, not in print, and adding a new dimension to a piece that did not, for instance, contain the phrase “baby airbag,” which my wife uses to refer to carriers.
Don't use these
      This is based on hard experience, one January day nearly 18 years ago, when she left our apartment on Pine Grove with 3-month-old Ross in one of those soft, front-facing carriers — a backpack you wear on your chest that you slide your baby into.
     She was only walking a block, to visit a friend. But it was a block of Chicago city sidewalk, with plenty of cracks and crevices, and she caught her toe on one and pitched forward, breaking her fall with her knee, an outstretched palm and our baby’s head.
     I was at home, having taken time off work to do my share of diaper changing. I don’t remember the phone call — I can’t say with any certainty whether she was composed or hysterical, though I would put my chips down on the latter.
     What I remember clearly, vividly, as if it were a scene in a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman movie, was grabbing the empty blue stroller — she must have told me to bring it — and running full bore the several blocks to St. Joseph Hospital, pushing the empty baby carriage, with no idea whether our happy little urban homestead was about to be plunged into some medical nightmare of irreparable cranial damage. 
     A slight skull fracture, which took sitting for six hours in windowless rooms for the hospital to ascertain, via X-ray and CAT scans. My wife’s main memory is of the CAT scan operator asking, “Can’t you make him hold still?” and her answering, “He’s a baby.” 
     The other moment I can recall from that day is, toward the end of our Big Hospital Day, when one of the endless series of doctors who kept hurrying into the room, burst in with a blustery, “So how’s our little patient?” to which I replied, with all the gravitas I could manage, “Doctor, he’s incontinent and babbling!” which caused a flash of concern over the physician’s face until he remembered that all 3-month-old babies are incontinent and babbling.
      Ross was fine, the shadow of fate that passed over us kept moving and darkened some other poor soul’s home.
     My wife threw the baby carrier away and became a one-woman truth squad against them. Still, because people are biased by their own experiences, I didn’t want to unfairly question baby carriers’ utility. There are risks associated with strollers, too. At crossings, there is a tendency to nudge them into the street — “testing the waters,” I call it — despite passing traffic, and I know that babies have been grievously injured that way.
     But a little checking shows the risks of baby carriers is not limited to my family. In 2010, the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned of the risk of suffocation to young infants in baby slings —14 deaths in a 20-year period, with three dying in 2009. Most were under 4 months old. 
Consumer Reports found three dozen serious injuries to babies in slings, and urged parents “Don’t use slings at all.” 
     Even the most cuddly, fuzzy mommy website about baby carriers has a list of warnings. TBW, “The Babywearer.com” warns of babies falling out of carriers and urges practice with a doll. “Most of the reported accidents involving babywearing are due to the wearer tripping and falling,” it cautions. 
     Among its suggestions:
     — Careful going through doorways.
     —Don’t cook or handle hot liquids, for obvious reasons. Mind that the tail of your baby sling doesn’t trail into flames or get stuck in closing doors.
     — Don’t wear a baby carrier in moving cars; it’s no substitute for a baby seat. “For playing sports or cycling, use your discretion: What would happen to your baby if you were knocked over?” it asks. “How much is your baby being bounced or shaken?”
      I would say “use your discretion” is a naive underestimation of just how god-awful stupid people can be, and substitute, “Never bicycle with your baby in a front carrier.” 
     I hadn’t planned on writing about baby carriers. But I felt morally obligated to inject a note of warning. Babies are resilient; they aren’t as fragile as new parents fear. But caution is still a good idea, and you can’t avoid perils you don’t know about.


Thursday, November 14, 2013

The Tristero and the Tri-Lateral Commission no doubt are involved too


     As a rule, people are hot to complain, particularly now, when the Internet allows the gripers and moaners to find each other and form a mass of perceived significance. I can't say that found the Ventra cards particularly oppressive. Then again, my mailbox wasn't stuffed with dozens of duplicates, nor was my CTA account bobbled, nor did I park for hours on the phone trying to get through to a human Ventra worker to try to solve my problems with the transit card. So in that spirit of open-mindedness, I was all too happy to deliver this spanking to Cubic, the ooh-scary defense contractor who masterminded the continually deepening disaster.   

     There is a species of humor I think of as the “just when you think it couldn’t get any worse” joke. You know the type, where increasingly ugly woes are piled, one atop the other, and then the coup de grace, which is always something like “... and the hooker was your mother.”
     Consider Ventra.
     First, regular transit users were inundated with new cards; some received hundreds. Then switching over balances and accounts proved impossible. As did complaining about the problems. Even if you got your card, transferred your balance and used it correctly, Ventra might charge you a couple more times as you fled the train station.
      But that’s not the really bad part.
      Now comes the over-the-top note to kick the whole thing from a problem-plagued rollout — "fiasco" is the word critics are using — to some kind of surreal epic disaster, like New Coke, as skittish passengers already aggrieved over Ventra learn it is run by one of those immense and scary defense contractors of whom half the public lives in moral terror already.
     "Poisonous" was the word used at Tuesday's CTA "good news" meeting taken over by critics who lined up to castigate the "evil company" receiving $454 million to serve as ringmaster over this civic nightmare.
     Ventra is run by Cubic Transportation, which is a division of Cubic Corp.,  the Thomas Pynchonesque name of a San Diego company which, when it isn't botching new fare cards for transit systems is, according to the Cubic website, "a leading provider of live and virtual training systems, and a specialized supplier of military electronics and information assurance solutions."
     Think surveillance drones, which are the cat's paw of American hysteria already.
     It gets worse.
     "Nearly every U.S. and allied soldier and fighter pilot has trained or will train for a mission using Cubic equipment," the website continues.
     Well golly, that kinda explains why we're still in Afghanistan, huh? In the name of fairness, I phoned Cubic's press representative. No reply, but if my house is a smoldering crater, well, you'll know who to blame even if you can't find them.
     But that still isn't the bad part, to me. I have nothing against giant military contractors. I still use Morton salt. Somebody's gotta do it. And besides, Cubic has run the CTA fare card system for 20 years. Nobody cared about its parent company's military surveillance work before.
     The bad part is that this is nothing new for Cubic.
     "Unfortunately, Chicagoland is now only the latest in a long line of metropolitan customers dealing with problems sure to be familiar to Ventra's legion of haters," Jason Prechtel wrote in the Gaper's Block website, in a detailed article on problems in Cubic cities from London to Brisbane to San Francisco.
     Were these rollouts bug-infested or just the standard problems that come with any new system? Hardly matters. It's too late. Ventra has sailed past the still-a-few-kinks-in-the-system shakedown cruise into a special realm of PR debacle hell where each tiny trouble is waved about as Exhibit #246 in the epic Ventra Catastrophe of 2013.
     It's the City that Works, remember? And when it doesn't work, well, it ain't pretty.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

The map of time



     I'll probably never know who left this book on the river wall along Wacker Drive, just where it stops going west and begins turning south (or, I suppose, where it stops going north, coming the other way, and turns east).
     Nor will I know why it was left there, exposed to the elements, for quite a while by the time I came by — far beyond any rescue. It was chilling, to see a book so abused. No doubt the product of carelessness, though it did seem to symbolize something larger, a place we are approaching in our society.  Already we've seen books sold by the pound, or with their covers ripped off and bundled with twine as some interior designer's daft idea of decoration. You walk into Half Price Books, and just sense that printed books are worth less. Not worthless, not yet anyway. But worth less than even a few years ago.
     I'm not going to lament the printed word — the electronic word will carry on just fine, just as we can still fill up our cars without gas station attendants. Seneca pressed his words in wax with a stylus — the original meaning of "book" was "writing tablet" (a very old, Teutonic word, The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that "book" and "beech" share a root, and that perhaps the tablets were made from the bark of beech trees). 
    In other words, the manner of writing has always changed, so let's not get too bent out of shape that the process continues. The words remain. The influence of the printed word will continue as countless ghosts in the electronic machine, just as the chapters of books now are thought to reflect the individual scrolls that were once gathered together into "books."
    It can be argued the form doesn't ultimately matter. It is what is being said, not the medium it is being said in.
    That is mostly true. But not entirely.
    The form had value. The drawbacks of books — expensive to print, unable to be corrected — were also their glory, also exactly why they were cherished. Scarcity creates value, and you couldn't get a copy of "Moby-Dick" everywhere you go. Now you can. The reason so much time and effort was put into making books as good as they could be (Sometimes. Let's not overstate the case) is you can't correct them. You have to get them right, because they are supposed to be around for a long time. Were supposed to be around for a long time. Now they're raw material in art projects and, I assume, someday, fuel.
      Books will migrate entirely onto pads and phones and what have you, but it will not be the same, and hybrid forms will quickly emerge that better use those mediums. People will enjoy whatever we call the new art form — maybe "books” still, the way we call the control panels on our cars "dashboards" even though there is no horse to dash and kick up mud. We will still be moved by them, and will look at our paper books with puzzlement and disinterest, the way people today look at player piano scrolls and stereopticon slides.
     They also have flaws. Books don't hold up well to the elements, for instance. Of course, they don't break apart when dropped, either. Different technology, different advantages and drawbacks. But technology can't be fought. Technology wins, eventually.
     The book, by the way, was a novel by Felix J. Palma called The Map of Time. 


Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Tattoos are here to stay

     At lunch Monday, an older lady was going on about a young man of her acquaintance, and in the middle of her catalogue of his woes—smoking pot, doing poorly in school, facial piercings—she mentioned that he is tattooed too, and I opened my mouth to explain that whatever moral taint tattooing once had is now gone. Long gone. What was once the realm of sailors and bikers and hookers has been claimed by the young and the hip (plus the not so young and not so hip). "Everyone" doesn't have them, but many more people have them than was the case a few decades back, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. 
    Why? Theories abound, but to me it is clear. We are a mobile society where old strictures of community and religion have softened, if not fallen away, and tattoos are a colorful way to manifest yourself, to belong to a portable community of like-minded people, to illustrate your values, quite literally, and try to transcend yourself. Tattoos convey meaning, and getting them is seen as a significant act.  Denouncing them, to me, is an expression of cluelessness and stodginess on par with taking a stand against the Beatles in 1964.  It's a sign you're not paying attention.
     That said, I'd never get one, and over the summer, when I visited a few tattoo parlors, researching a story on the practice, I pondered why, particularly when, at one parlor, I considered getting the smallest of tattoos--say a tattooed freckle—to see what it felt like, and I recoiled at the thought, of even tattooing a dot. The moment I contemplated it, I pictured carving the thing out of my arm with a pocketknife. 
     Why? Because it was permanent? Even though so much we do is "permanent" -- choices we make, people we embrace or reject, doors we open or close. Life is permanent. Isn't the inability to paint a permanent circle on the sole of your foot represent some kind of bone-deep timidity? A flaw I should work on, perhaps by getting a tattoo?
     Perhaps.
     But know thyself, as the Delphic oracle says. And I'm someone who, as a young man, saw a much older, third-tier columnist who had the sort of column where he was always working as a dishwasher and a circus clown, being dipped in pudding and, one day, getting a tattoo. It was a tattoo of a quill pen in a crystal ink well—'cause he was a writer, see?—and I took one look at him, his shirt sleeves rolled up high, a la Bob Fosse, goatish beard, strutting the newsroom, and felt a shiver of revulsion I feel still. So no tattoos for me, ever, thanks to him. 
    Yet for people who are not me, they're fine.  I look placidly upon tattoos, attractive ones I mean. Some people have these enormous blotches, big green mandellas the size of saucers. Those I do shake my head at—what were they thinking?—but not because they're tattoos, but because they're ugly tattoos.
     Most aren't ugly, however. Most are artful, or at least intriguing, and the argument that they will look awful once the youthful skin ages is an empty one — that old skin won't look so hot, tattoo or no.
      Besides, I have eight lovely, smart, accomplished nieces, and most of them have tattoos, some more than one tattoo. That's also common. People tend to  love their tattoos and, rather than regret getting them, they tend to get more, to collect them. So times change, and we change with them, whether decorating your body with ink, or welcoming the practice as a manifestation of the human thirst for meaning and beauty.