Who knew it would get cold in January?

     Metra has been apologizing a lot lately, explaining that last week's severe weather caught them off guard and, umm, left them reeling, apparently. The air was too cold. The snow was too fine. Which the loyal Metra customer might be tempted to shrug off — generally the trains run on time — except that the railroad does lots of things in a cack- handed way. This is only the latest example. 

     The Union Station tracks are hellacious. The ceiling leaks -- not drops, but dribbles, showers of God-knows-what-liquid right in the middle of the dark, dank, crumbling platforms. Every time it rains -- not an extreme rain, just a rain rain. 

    The platforms are loud. They're smokey -- Metra can't seem to ventilate the place. Nor can they get the people out. The station doesn't seem designed for disembarking passengers from trains, and thus they must crowd together and wait in enormous lines, shuffling up the stairs and toward the light and air. It's dreary, and dangerous, and after some panic causes a stampede and kills 17 people, remember that Metra had been warned explicitly about the deathtrap — right here, on Jan. 21, 2014 — and did nothing. 

     It goes on. There is no signage that tells you, when you get off the train, which way is the Madison Street exit and which way the station -- or, rather, there is a sign, but it's so poorly designed, high up and out of sight, that nobody notices it. Metra generally has not mastered the entire art of communicating words to people. That's slightly understandable on the platform, where the deafening din, which would be illegal to inflict upon unprotected workers in factories,  drowns out any attempt to communication. But it's that way in the station too, where I noticed this gentleman, during the cold snap earlier this month, using a bullhorn attempt to inform the milling, confused crowd about the bolloxed  schedule. You'd think they'd get the whole "speaker" technology down by now.

    It's perhaps too easy to connect Metra's present woes with the mess over the summer related to the expensive firing of former CEO, Alex Clifford. But listening to the Metra counsel rhapsodize about Michael Madigan's 1st Amendment rights to bully government workers into giving raises for his chosen pets, and attending a farcical hearing of the House Mass Transit Committee, you came away with the sense that none of these people were lying awake at night trying to figure out how to keep the switches from freezing up come  January. They were padding their pockets and plotting their escapes. 

    Metra offered Clifford $718,000 to go away quietly. I bet that would defrost a lot of door mechanisms. Me, I'd have let him air his, as it turns out, completely legitimate complaints, and hired a few more clean-up crews. 
     In Metra's defense, they have a lot of hard-working, decent, friendly conductors (and a few pompous, theatrical, crusty old jerks, but they're tolerable). They generally do a good job. But not always, not consistently, and not lately. 

     The temperature supposed to hover around zero again today. 

It's hard to believe what the Right will believe

     The devil makes work for idle hands, as the Puritan fathers used to say, praising the protective power of hard work and keeping busy. Nowadays, they’d say the devil makes copy for idle eyes.

Such as late Friday, when, weary with tilling the reasonable world, I wandered over to the Drudge Report to see what was doing in that fun house Hall of Mirrors, and noticed this headline: “REPORT: 41k Canadians flee country over health care system ...”

     Which caused me to think — perhaps the first thought applied to that particular item — Canadians flee ... to where? Where are those Canadians fleeing? Surely not here.

     Intrigued, I clicked on the link, and was brought to The Daily Caller, a “24-hour news publication providing its audience with original reporting, in-depth investigations, thought-provoking commentary and breaking news.” Nine million visitors a month. 

     The story begins: “Every year thousands of Canadians have no choice but to seek medical care outside of the country’s single-payer health care system,” then cites a report from the “free-market Fraser Institute.” How many Canadians do this? Exactly 41,838 became “medical tourists” in 2013, it says, who “sought care outside of their hockey-loving country.” That is the extent of The Daily Caller’s in-depth investigation. The rest of the article speculates about the reasons Canadians would leave: “concerns about quality, seeking out more advanced health care facilities, higher tech medicine or better outcomes.” 

     In case the meaning of this is lost on The Daily Caller readers, it quotes the director of health policy studies at Fraser, who spells it out: “That a considerable number of Canadians traveled and paid to escape the well-known failings of the Canadian health care system speaks volumes about how well the system is working for them.”

    “A considerable number.” Now that’s an interesting phrase. Kinda vague, compared to a specific figure like “41,838.” So let us ask one of those probing, in-depth questions that The Daily Caller suggests it likes to ask: Just how considerable is that number?  

     Are 41,838 Canadians a lot? 
      How could we determine that? Well, we could compare it to another country. Are there any other countries nearby? Yes. The United States. The United States is directly south of Canada. The two share a border. (And if I seem to have clicked into simplistic language, remember, right-wingers will be reading this. I want them to follow along).

     And do medical tourists also leave the U.S. looking for health care in other countries? Yes, they do. Is that a knowable number? Yes, it is.

     The Centers for Disease Control estimated about 750,000 Americans travel abroad to seek medical care, primarily because it is far cheaper.

     But wait, you might ask. While 750,000 is far more than 41,838, is not the U.S. a far more populous nation than Canada? Yes, it is. The population of the United States is 311 million, while the population of Canada is 35 million. Which means, there is one medical tourist for every 414 people in the U.S., while in Canada, there is one for every 836 people.

     Meaning, if medical tourism is a sign of poor health care — as The Daily Caller claims with its insultingly simple bit of agitprop and the Drudge Report brainlessly echoes and trumpets — the problem is twice as bad in the free-market United States as in socialized-medicine Canada.

     And this doesn’t even factor in that the numbers come from the Fraser Institute, a group dedicated to boosting corporations and running down government, research paid for by Exxon and the Koch Brothers.

     None of this matters to the Right, of course. They form their conclusions first — government bad, Obama bad, immigrants bad, gays bad, women bad — then venture out into the world in their junkie scramble to find something they can twist into proof.

     The sad thing about the whole health care debate is there was none. President Obama tried, and to a degree succeeded, to bring the nation into line with every other industrialized nation on earth by offering health care for people who need it. And the Republicans fought like dogs to stop him and now, having failed, are trying to roll it back. I wouldn’t have believed there would be a dozen people in the country gullible enough to be against American citizens having health care, wouldn’t believe adults would cling to our broken, expensive, erratic system just because their corporate overlords told them to. But they do just that, embracing any idiocy that scratches their itch. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

   

Talk about justice delayed...

     A surprising number of murder victims are killed by their own family members — 25 percent in 2011, according to FBI statistics.

     That’s nothing new. Go back to ancient Greece. If you look at the family of Agamemnon, King of Argos, not only did he murder his daughter, then was killed in revenge by his wife, Clytemnestra, but she in turn was killed by their son, Orestes, in retribution.

     Was Orestes right to kill his mom? Justified or no, some wanted his head. His defense: Apollo told him to do it.

     If that situation intrigues you, you are in good company. Some of Chicago’s most respected legal minds will argue that case Jan. 29 to benefit the National Hellenic Museum, which pairs Dan Webb, of Winston & Strawn, and noted personal injury lawyer Robert Clifford for the defense, facing the prosecutorial might of former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and Patrick Collins, of Perkins, Cole, in a trial overseen by Judge Richard Posner, of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, joined by two other judges.

     It is the same A-list group that tried Socrates last year to benefit the museum, an event that attracted a thousand people and reverberated across the country.
     "The trial of Socrates really captured the attention of a lot of people nationwide," Clifford said. "We're reproducing the program for the American College of Trial Lawyers." I was a juror on the Socrates trial, voting — to my vast surprise — to condemn the philosopher, based on Fitzgerald's ironclad case against him. I'm sitting on the Orestes jury, too, though so is everyone else in the room.
      "This story is really the first time that Greek democracy evolved to where there was judgment by the community, by the people, and the right to trial by jury," said Clifford. "Up to this time, it was a bloody society based on revenge and family."
     A bloody society, which, I must point out, many gun fanatics dream of returning to. I'm not sure why the Second Amendment should trump the Seventh Amendment, which gives us trial by jury, but while vigilante justice is celebrated in some quarters, actual deliberative justice gets second-guessed and ridiculed. I'm not expecting the trial of Orestes to change that, but it is a timely reminder that we should respect jury trials more than we do.
     All of this high-priced legal talent is volunteering their time, a reminder that, like jury trials, lawyers get a bad rap sometimes.
     "First and foremost, this is intended to benefit a worthy cause, the Hellenic Museum," Clifford said.
     Having seen it last year, there is nothing jokey or ad hoc about the proceedings. These guys come prepared, and the event is fascinating to watch and participate in.
     "For the lawyers, it helps us raise awareness of principles; it's a real privilege to be involved in something like this," Clifford said. "It keeps you engaged, on your best scholarship. All four lawyers will spend time reading things different than modern-day briefs. It enriches you as a person, helps your set of trial skills. It's not the same thing as a real trial, but your juices are flowing and it helps you maintain your edge when you do go into the courtroom."
     The trial will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. Jan. 29 at the UIC Forum. Go to nationalhellenicmuseum.org to buy the $100 tickets without hefty service fees that don't go to the museum. The $50 student tickets must be purchased in person at the museum gift shop with a student ID.
     "Duty, honor, revenge, justice," Clifford said. "All these concepts are in play here."

Buy my poster

     I love posters. They catch your attention. They freeze a moment — an event, a time, an era. They are art, or can be. They convey useful information. Posters are the predecessor of newspapers, which began as handbills stuck on walls, and — encouraging to those of us who linger in the inky professions — they not only remain, but thrive in the electronic age. 

Atlas Stationers, 227 W. Lake St., Chicago, a cool, family-owned store,
crammed with office supplies and neat stuff.

     When Eli's Cheesecake advertised on my blog in November and December, I decided to take the money Marc Schulman paid for the ads and roll it back into my blog, in the form of marketing. And the very first idea I came up with — perhaps damningly—was to make a poster. Something hand-typeset. There was a pleasing symmetry to that: the old supporting the new. I phoned a few letterpress shops in Chicago, but never heard back from them.
      Undaunted, I contacted the mothership of poster printing: Hatch Show Print, of Nashville, Tennessee, a busy and growing letterpress shop that has been turning out posters, for circuses and country music acts and, now, a blog, continuously since 1879. They have an unrivaled collection of wooden type, some characters six feet tall.  In November, I wrote this post about them, and commissioned Hatch to make my poster — after I endured the customary two-month waiting period, that is.
     I sketched out the poster, and Hatch's Laura B. produced the poster at right from my design, printed on heavy stock paper. Working with her was pleasant beyond words. I'm biased, of course, but I find the result very handsome. Only 100 were made, and I've signed and numbered them, 1 through 100. Most I'm either giving to friends and supporters of the blog, or putting up around town, in simpatico places of business around Chicago, in the windows of friendly stores. Not only is it lovely art, I tell the at first skeptical proprietors, but if they put one up, I will photograph the poster and post the picture on the blog, where they will enjoy a blaze of publicity, and people will consider them hip. I'm thinking through the ethical/legal aspects of also plastering the posters in public spaces—that'll be a separate entry. What's the point of a poster if you don't cook up some wheat paste and slap it up on a brick wall, somewhere? The question is where. And I suppose "if" too. One must act morally. 
     When I announced my intentions last November, several readers signed up to buy the poster sight unseen —I have a list of their names, and will contact them individually. But I'm also offering a few for sale to the public for the quite reasonable price of $15, plus $6 shipping and handling (aka, postage and a sturdy mailing tube). I'm planning to sell 40 and then stop. 
    If you would like one, send a $21 check to me, Neil Steinberg, at 2000 Center Ave., Northbrook, IL, 60062. If you're in a different country, send an international money order and add and extra $5 — $26 total — for the international postage. Make sure to include your name and address. While I would never suggest that the poster's scarcity will make it valuable someday, well, stranger things have happened. When I'm dead and the things are selling on eBay for a thousand dollars a pop, you'll wish you had bought one now. And if they're never worth more than $15, or two bucks, or a dime—my hunch—it'll be something you'll enjoy looking at for quite some time, and remind you which blog you should consult on a daily basis.

What happens next?

 

     There is a schism when it comes to the American Jewish support for Israel, between the old-school, United Jewish Appeal, whatever-Israel-does-is-right line of thinking, and an emerging, newer, J-Street, get-your-act-together attitude that tends to attract younger, more progressive Jews. I find myself straddling the two, though shifting toward the latter. If something you care about is hurtling toward ruin, cheering them as they sail over the cliff is not my idea of "support." And the Israeli government doesn't help its case by a black-or-white, for-us-or-against-us mentality that tends to ignore the idea of a middle perspective.

     What happens next? 

     A child’s question, really, something naive, blurted out when the tale goes on too long. Cut to the chase, Daddy. How does the story end?

     The last time I bothered talking to Israeli leaders in Chicago — more than two years ago — I sat down with the then consul general and trotted that question out, my device for cutting through the endless seesawing of blame. Forget blame, forget history — that’s done, the rope both sides use to play tug-of-war as the years roll by and nothing happens. Stipulate history as having occurred; what about now? You’ve got these 4 million Palestinians living under your control, in Gaza and the West Bank, for approaching 50 years. What is going to happen to them?

     At which point there was a lot of talk about settlers and land and the two-state solution and how there is no Palestinian leadership with which to make peace.

All very true; none of it an answer. 

The Palestinian leadership, or, rather, “leaderships” since there are several, can’t come up with an answer either. They issue a wail of grievance, some legitimate, some not, one heard again last week when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died, years after suffering a stroke. They brand him a mass murderer for allowing Christian militia to slaughter Palestinians in Lebanon in 1983.

     Yes, yes, all true. But what do the Palestinians want now? You would think, as oppressed as they supposedly are, they would be hot to push some immediate practical solution. But they're not. Their vision involves the Jews magically vanishing and the country returning to them in its 1947 condition; not that it was theirs in 1947 either, mind you. If there's a Palestinian plan besides the Israelis handing the whole country over to them on a platter, I haven't heard it.
     No wonder I've barely mentioned Israel since ... November 2011, because nothing has changed, and stasis is, well, "boring" is the wrong word. How about "tragic." This situation is the definition of a tragedy — those involved squirm against their natures but do nothing definitive as fate bears them toward their doom. This is a situation penned by Arthur Miller.
     For Israel, pulling out unilaterally just gives the terrorist minority freedom to lob rockets into Israel, again. To stay continues the civic nightmare that ebbs and flares.
     So where does that leave us? Israel could keep going in this fashion. The world scowls, but luckily for Israel, its existence is not a referendum. The world doesn't have to love Jews in order for them to survive. My filter for viewing the situation can be summed up in four words: "They hated us before." Before Israel was created, a good number of otherwise civilized countries viewed the Jews who had lived there for centuries as a foreign presence who could be guiltlessly killed. Kind of how the Palestinians generally view Jews to this day. That is the key that unlocks the mystery of a world that yawns off centuries of atrocity in most places but sits up, takes notice, and waves Israeli misdeeds as proof of ineligibility to exist. And the Palestinians? They're lucky in that, unlike, oh, the Kurds, their jailer is the Israelis, who the world, for reasons mentioned above, keeps on a short leash. Otherwise they might languish in limbo forever, like Turkish Kurds and, guess what? They still might.
     Shall we end on an optimistic note, false though it may be? As a Jew, I have a dog in this race: I liked to think that Judaism means something, that it isn't just the brand of people in power in a particular sliver of land in the Middle East. Judaism isn't just matzo balls, but an attitude toward justice, in theory, so that if grinning history places 4 million unhappy people under your authority, you don't just shrug their lives away and push them into increasingly small, impoverished and desperate corners of a land they don't own. You figure it out, eventually. Israel has tried — that old devil history, creeping in — and it hasn't worked. But guess what? Israel has to keep trying. It has to figure it out, using that vaunted Israeli strategic thinking that once got it out of pickles like this. What happens next? The fence was smart — define a border, keep the bombers out. Now they have to take the next step, move from this problem to the next set of problems, whatever it will be.
     Never leaving is not a forever strategy. The Palestinians have an advantage over the Kurds or other recipients of the short end of history's stick in that a swath of the world is happy to make them the poster children for the Further Crimes of the Jews. But they shouldn't mistake that dubious honor for actual concern about their lives and future. That, they must come up with themselves. It would be a good start. What happens next?

     

Clark the Cub Redux

     One of the cardinal rules in this business, at least to me, is: don't linger. Obsessives quickly become boring. I always say, if I came across Jesus Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Grant Park, it would end up as three columns, tops—a two-parter about Jesus' speech, if I could find a way to make it interesting enough, and maybe a third column of reader reaction and then on to something else. Otherwise, you risk being Bob Greene hobby horsing for 100, count 'em 100, columns on Baby Richard, and we all know how that ended up.
     In other words, I'm loathe to hit Clark the Cub for a second day.
     But there are just so many loose threads. When I set aside my column on Israeli/Palestinian relations, and decided to express a bit of the deep loathing I had tweeted for fun Tuesday night, my first instinct was to talk to artists I knew, to get their professional opinion. The first one I turned to was Tony Fitzpatrick, he of the brilliant  collages. Tony wrote:

Rather than subject the already  psychologically battered Cub fans to a watered down version of the 'Care Bear' Mr. Ricketts should try something novel and save some money--rather than that mascot--He should  paint his ass and walk on his hands during the 7th inning stretch -- from home plate to the pitcher's mound. He should do this until the Cubs win the World Series. They are now embarking on their second century of sucking.

      I couldn't just leave that on the cutting room floor. And then another pal, who asked that I not use his name because he is friends with folk who trapped in the corporate maw of the Cubs organization, but allowed me to say that he is a long-time season ticket holder and member of SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research.  His response was a marvel of insight and concision: 

Clark is a meaningless distraction.  Real baseball fans give as much mental space to various team mascots as they do to pigeons crapping on the concourse.  While the game broadly conceived includes lots of things that happen off the field (the experience of the stadium (sound, smells, sight), food and drink, keeping score, talking about the action), mascots are there to distract little kids.  So let the Cubs move boldly into the 1970s with this furry guy.  I lose no sleep over this, and any Cubs fan who is having palpitations should look at the pitching staff and the, third base and the outfield instead.  Any Sox fan who is gloating should just remember Ribbie and Rhubarb and the shameful firing of Andy the Clown.

     "So the Cubs move boldly into the 1970s" —you see why I love the guy. That's a phrase worth engraving on a coin.
      I'll spare you the rest, most praising the column, some responding with a variety of complaints, ranging from it being a waste of prime sports page real estate (as opposed, I wrote back, to the deeply significant matters typically dealt with in the sports pages) and those who were genuinely puzzled as to why I didn't like Clark (to whom I repeated Louis Armstrong's always-useful quip to someone who asked him to explain jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know.")
     I was truly thrilled to hear from both Wayne Messmer, he of the golden throat, and broadcast legend Chet Coppock. It was good to be interviewed for "All Things Considered" (which they never aired — I guess "Almost All Things Considered" might be a better name. Despite my frequent forays locally, I'm not really National Public Radio material — for instance, I was told they couldn't utter the name of this blog on NPR, which is just sad.  I bet if the blog were called "Goddamn the United States Every Day" they'd find a way). Anyway, it did stick in my craw a bit after I got off the phone and thought about it. Eighteen years writing a column for the paper, and Clark the Cub prompts National Public Radio to call.Here I'm worried about trifling with a cultural brouhaha for a day too long, when perhaps my problem is that I don't do it often enough.

Cubs find a way to strike out in the off-season

     I had a serious column on the Israeli situation all ready for today. But Tuesday night, I found myself at the ramparts on Twitter, howling— somewhat uncharacteristically — against this new Cubs mascot. In the morning, it seemed too much fun not to work up a version for the paper. The Middle East crisis will have to wait.

     What’s the No. 1 rule with mascots? And it’s OK to cheat, to flip open your textbooks to ‘‘Chief Illiniwek.’’

     Give up? Hint: It’s the same as the first rule for doctors: ‘‘First, do no harm.’’

     Mascots are not supposed to degrade the brand. They’re supposed to help, to foster goodwill, to spark enthusiasm and affection for your team/restaurant/ university. They’re not supposed to be awful, derivative, generic clip art that drives true fans insane and is a lightning rod for ridicule and contempt.

     Meet Clark the Cub, which the team introduced to the world Monday and which, I predict, will be quietly withdrawn sometime in 2016, if not before. Please God.

     My immediate, visceral reaction was horror. I could not have been more revolted had the Cubs unveiled as their mascot a severed calf head on a stick, dripping gore and buzzing with flies. ‘‘Holly the Heifer Head.’’ Nor was I alone. The Twitterverse lit up.
     ''Clark will never survive the true fans' wrath,'' Bob Godfrey of Michigan tweeted.
     Deadspin panned the pantless obscenity in a story headlined, with admirable journalistic detachment, ''TheCubs' New Mascot Is A Nightmarish Perverted Furry.'' Clark was presented as part of a Cubs program of ''systematically eradicating everything that's even remotely attractive about them,'' tying the abomination to the conversion of the neighborhood around Wrigley Field into the kind of charmless anodyne baseball mall from which the area once provided rare respite.
     What got me about Clark was the eyes — a pain in them, a kill-me-now sorrow cutting through its Smurf-like blandness. One thing about the Cubs, the team always had a vibe, a sense of graphic style — those Steve Musgrave-designed programs, the arcane beauty of Wrigley Field, those wool warmup jackets with 1908 Cubbie Bears on them.
     There was something so horribly familiar about Clark, I plunged into Google, looking. Care Bears? The Berenstain Bears? No, even cruder and more ratlike. Aha, Chuck E. Cheese. Closer. Maybe Cubby, the Draw Me Bear? Almost, but not quite.
     I appealed to Facebook, and the Hive Intelligence did not disappoint. Bill McCormick disinterred Kit Cloudkicker, from something called Disney's ''TaleSpin.''
     ''I can actually see Disney suing,'' he wrote.

      Let's look at them together; you decide. 

Kit Cloudkicker

Clark the Cub

     The new Cubs monstrosity created such a strong, uncharacteristic reaction of loathing in me, I tried to pull back and see it from the team's point of view. Children do seem to accept these homogenized characters — hence, the aforementioned Chuck E. Cheese — and this excrescence doesn't speak to actual fans but is designed to pacify the sick children it visits in hospitals (thus freeing actual players from the chore, a colleague even more cynical than myself pointed out).
     I phoned Grant DePorter, the author of a beautiful book, Hoodoo: Unraveling the 100-year-old Mystery of the Chicago Cubs.
     ''Way back then, mascots were lucky,'' said DePorter, who also is the CEO of the Harry Caray Restaurant Group. ''You needed a mascot to win the World Series. Maybe that's why they haven't won the World Series in many years - because they haven't had a mascot. If you look at it as a superstitious thing, you definitely want a mascot because it brings luck to the team. I'm an advocate for mascots, for sure. It might be the key we need to win the World Series.''
     Yes, yes, but this mascot? The love child of Kit Cloudkicker and Chuck E. Cheese?
     ''Have you looked at mascots around the country?'' DePorter asked. ''It's amazing how people respond to them. People love mascots.''
     I did as he suggested. Orbit and Paws and Screech and Sluggerrr, DJ Kitty and the deeply weird Mr. Red. Oh. My. God. Point taken. If the obvious intention of the Ricketts clan is to make the Cubs exactly like every other franchise, then they've taken another big step. What's next? Astroturf?
     So hold out hope. Maybe DePorter is right. Nothing is forgotten in baseball, and maybe 100 years from now, in some unimaginable bicentennial history, The Cubs: 200 Years of Bitter Disappointment, there will be Clark the Cub illustrating ''Chapter 69 - The Ricketts Years: The Blundering Continues.''