Trying to soothe your fear with guns

    Yesterday was interesting.
    My column, in brief,  quoted the superintendent of the Chicago police, Garry McCarthy, saying that we don't have to debate the wisdom of concealed carry gun permits. Just sit back and watch the tragedies unfold.
     I agreed with him.
     The column did not call for gun control, did not suggest action. Just the opposite, I recognized the utter inertia that our nation has fallen into, browbeaten by the NRA, the gun industry, and the slice of America that worships firearms. 
    A person can own a gun for many reasons: sport, protection, habit, tradition, fear. I didn't enter into any of that. What I said was that the usefulness of a gun increases with its availability to the owner, which also increases the danger it poses to him. Obviously true.  And nobody really debated that. Furthermore, since crimes are rare—no gun fan seemed capable of acknowledging this either—compared to gun accidents and suicides, for most people the risk of owning a gun outweighs any real benefit. 
     Many people wrote in demanding "facts," and I wrote back regarding suicides. Buying a gun increases the odds that you will kill yourself—the Harvard School of Public health found "a powerful link" between gun ownership and suicide. Those gun owners who shoot someone typically shoot themselves. 
     Faced with this, my correspondents withdrew, hurrying no doubt to gun chat boards to hoot and holler.
     My view is at odds with the Clint Eastwood fantasy. And nothing honks a man off like having his fantasy pointed out, never mind questioned, never mind mocked. It's a lot more fun to imagine yourself getting the drop on the bad guy at the next Sandy Hook than realizing that buying a gun increases the odds of a violent death for yourself and your family.
     Not being a zealot, I can let this go. It's masochistic of me to bring it up for a second day. But I do find the discussion interesting, reading all these comments -- emails, I ignored the comments after my column. Comments after newspaper stories are generally from trolls who would jeer at an 8-year-old with cancer.  
    But reading my email, I realized something. Gun supporters aren't interested in debate. They just want to browbeat and hector anyone who raises the issue. Though give them credit. They have fight in them. Those who support gun control sit looking at their hands, timid, silent. And to be honest, I respect, if that is the right word, the gun supporters more. At least they have the courage of their convictions and act on them, speaking in loud, sneering, utterly-confident voices. Those who think otherwise — the majority, if you believe polls — are too abashed, or indifferent, to speak.  They've given up. 
     Not me obviously. I can point out the flaws in the gun argument. I can also easily and sincerely tick off the value of guns—as beautiful, collectible objects, for target practice, hunting, to provide protection for those few who are truly endangered, and to give comfort and a sense of security—false, but security nonetheless—to the many who are not.  Plus we're stuck with 'em. 
     I've had fun shooting guns on a number of occasions—at several ranges around Chicago. I have gone pheasant hunting in Wisconsin and skeet shooting in Colorado.  I had an FOID card—it expired, eventually, but I've been meaning to renew it—that I got to take my sons shooting in Des Plaines, and would have bought a gun for that purpose had they showed any interest. (I was a pretty good shot, which I credit to years of video shooter games). I find it sad that those who passionately support gun rights, are unable to explore the borders of their belief. They can't look at the other side and find merit. They can't even look at all, and couldn't come up with a positive aspect of gun control, well, if you put a gun to their heads. Not one. 
    Indeed, they seem almost offended, not by what I said so much but by the idea that someone was talking about their predilection, casting doubts about their fantasies. The gun world is so radicalized that respected sportsmen's columnists have been hounded from their jobs just for straying slightly from an absolute, pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-hands extremism.  Good thing I don't work for an outdoors magazine.
     As I read over their fuming, nasty, sarcastic, anti-Semitic taunts that made up this Greek chorus of complaint, seeing the view offered by the soda straw they peer at life through, what stood out was their anger and anxiety. To a man. Which made me wonder: why are they so mad?  They've won. The issue is dead, the day theirs. Guns for everybody, all the time. I never suggested we implement the faintest whisper of gun control, didn't call to ban a single exotic bullet,  because that would be completely impossible in our climate of Congressional cowardice. And  I make it a rule never to advocate the impossible. I merely pointed out that guns are dangerous and the more guns, the more danger, just like the superintendent said. There is no need to argue. All we have to do is wait.
    But that is blasphemy enough. This is, at bottom, a religious issue, if not religious, then certainly a matter of faith. Their faith is not in law, not in God, not in society, but in guns. There is certainly a religious fanaticism to all this. It's a passion, almost sexual in nature. No wonder they don't want anyone drawing attention to it. They are like onanists caught in the act,  blustering through their embarrassment, hurt and humiliation, shouting at the intruder. Go away. So faith and a kind of twisted psycho-sexual fixation. Guns give comfort and security to people who obviously sorely lack both. You can't argue that. Guns are owned by people who feel they need guns. I know gun owners on my block. Lots of guns. Yet we live in the same peaceful place. We've talked about it. Nobody is going to yank that blankie from him. One reader wrote to me that Obama was to blame for the sale of 100 million guns, and I wrote back asking why, given that he has done absolutely nothing to restrict gun sales and no rational person believes he ever will. 
     And the reader said, not realizing how right he is: yes, but they were afraid he might. 
     Which is what this whole thing is about. Guns are comfort for people who are afraid, frightened of a changing world, of menacing minorities, of dangers real and imagined. And to be honest, I recognize that placebo as having a value. It's bad to be scared. Arm yourselves, by all means. I wouldn't dream of stopping you. Though I don't understand why your fear should be the only consideration on this subject, the beginning, middle and end of the debate, not that we're debating.   
     If you are terrified, of life, of your neighbors, of vague menaces, get a gun or, rather, lots of guns, since, like any addiction, one stops being effective, and you need more to get the same calming effect. Not for all gun owners, let me state clearly, not that it will help. Maybe you're a security guard, or like to hunt squirrels. There are uses. But for a lot they're totems, comfort objects, like little metal dollies. Certainly the guys I heard from yesterday seemed to have that going on. Though owning lots of guns doesn't seem to make them feel secure either -- they're still afraid, afraid now that someone will take their guns. Afraid of my analyzing this, of asking questions. Pointing out that, rather than making anyone safer in any way other than the psychological, guns imperil their owners, their families and everybody else. It seems unfair that I can listen to and understand and accept their reasoning but they can neither hear nor grasp nor accept mine, nor even make the effort. Enough. As I said, let's not argue about it. Because the incident that happened in your youth, the fistfight that wed you to guns for life, is not a compelling argument for an armed society, in my view. And you obviously aren't listening to anything I have to say. But thanks for reading.  

No need to argue over concealed carry permits; just watch

     The purpose of the news media is not to be a hallelujah chorus, not to clap our hands like seals whenever an official does or says something we feel is right. They pay a PR staff to do that.

     What we are supposed to do is find flaws, point out problems, hint toward solutions. That’s our role.

     So not a lot of “Well played, Mr. Mayor!” in this space. Not that there’s much cause for it anyway.    Which is why I want to depart from habit today and tip my hat to Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy, because he said something that is utterly true and will certainly be born out by events.

As the state of Illinois sent out its first 5,000 concealed-carry permits, he noted: “Stand by and watch what happens. The answer to gun violence is not more guns.”

     We don’t get a lot of “stand by and watch what happens” in politics. We are so hot to debate, to argue,  to predict, to shout down the other guy — especially on guns, where arm-everybody proponents have adopted an all-or-nothing, cover-our-ears-and-howl approach that forbids even thinking about the issue — we forget there are facts under all this, a verifiable reality just waiting for us to notice, or, more likely, to not notice.

     What are those facts? Well, some — and I know this will jar the “All libs hate guns and want them confiscated” mindset — support liberal gun rights. There are 300 million guns in this country, and if the vast majority weren’t being handled safely, the carnage would be far worse than it already is.

     To continue reading, click here.

Television's dying and I'm not feeling so hot myself

     The hour that I spent watching "Chicagoland" on CNN Thursday probably equalled my entire time spent watching cable news over the past year. Maybe two. I used to watch more, on the little TV in my office. But they took it away, and brought in a new little flatscreen, and I never figured out how to turn it on. That is bad, I know, the aging pundit who can't work a newfangled device. But the truth is, I never really needed to watch it. There isn't anything I can't pull off the Internet. 
    But occasionally my path crosses with TV. A couple weeks ago, when MSNBC asked me to appear on a morning show and talk about the profile of the mayor I wrote for Esquire. I said sure, though it was cold, and a dozen block stroll to NBC Tower, so I said they would have to send a car. They did. 
     Nestled in the back of a Cadillac, talking with the Bulgarian driver about the death of Lincoln Town Cars, seemed to magnify the importance of being on TV, a little. It may be waning, and they don't pay, but they'll still send a car. Huffington Post won't do that.

Smile.

     When I got to NBC Tower, it was pretty deserted, and the same guy who met me at the elevator also patted make-up on my enormous shiny dome and then got my mike clipped on and stuck a bug in my ear then worked the camera. We killed time, waiting for the show in New York, unseen, to get to me. We chatted about the decline of our respective industries. Mine seems to be falling apart faster than his, but it's a horse race, at times neck-and-neck. Good union guy. I felt like two old centurians, swapping tales about camp life back in Gaul. 
     TV used to be damned as this expanse of crap, a "vast wasteland," as Newt Minow famously said in the early 1960s, when it was Masterpiece Theater compared to what it became. Remember? Society fretted so much — what would this endless torrent of TV do to our children? Was watching TV "bad"? "Fifty-seven channels and nothing on," Bruce Springsteen sang. Twenty-two years ago. (God, he was in decline then. Age bites).
     It seems wrong that we should just let our worries go about TV, just drop that elaborate edifice of concern with a shrug and move on to the next. There should be a ceremony of some sort. A towering pyre of old Zeniths and Sylvanias and RCAs set aflame—maybe on barge, going down the Chicago River, at the Fire Festival this October. We shouldn't just abandon that deep, decades-old anxiety and stagger babbling to the next—Snapchat, is THAT bad for our kids?! Maybe someday we'll realize: it was the worry that was bad all along. The kids are always fine. Usually fine.
     Though we've really stopped fretting, haven't we? Worrying about the Internet is so 2003. That's over. Now technology just is. There's always heroin to worry about. 
     My appearance on MSNBC was dumb and brief—the host spent more time talking than listening to what I had to say, and I was reminded that not only has Fox News inflicted itself upon America, but its success inspired other legitimate networks to ape it and become shriller too. So you had Lou Dobbs denouncing immigrants on CNN. And this fellow — who never met Rahm and probably has never been to Chicago and might not be able to find it on a map — yabbering on, putting his snarky air quote marks around the pension crisis in Chicago, like it's something the mayor made up. Another 60 seconds and I might have come out with a, "Hey buddy, shut up. What the fuck's the matter with you?" I could feel the thought forming, ready to rise like a bubble in the back of my mind. Good thing it was over so quickly. I took a paper towel and tried to scrape the make-up off, wondering "Now why did I take an hour out of my day to do this?"
    At least I got a ride.  I went downstairs. The Cadillac was still waiting, to whisk me back to the newspaper, and it occurred to me that nothing MSNBC does ever resonates in my world. Not that what I do is rocking their world either. Still, why go on for two minutes when I could be on for two solid months and a person like myself would never know about it? Going on the program, coast to coast, had no repercussions at all. No high school friends got in touch to say they saw me on TV, the way they did when I appeared on "Oprah" 20 years ago. Mass media is turning into small media. Maybe that's good. We're all artisans now, back to being silversmiths, straddling a bench by the hearth fire, tapping away, making tea pots. Except a tea pot you could sell. We can't grieve over shifting mediums too much -- some scraps remain. There's still radio, despite everything. Records didn't kill radio—heck, CDs and now MP3s didn't even kill records. They're still around, fragments, but still around. I know calligraphers, violists, scribes. Maybe there will be enough wreckage for us older folks to cling to for a few more years, or at least the really determined ones. Or at least me. Or maybe not. 

Saturday fun: where IS this?

     Despite our mania for all things on-line and computerized, we still gather in public spaces, such as this attractive, airy interior courtyard in the ... well, I'm not saying. We'll make this place our Saturday fun contest. Where is this? A few hints — it's in the city, not the suburbs ("enough suburbs," my wife said, with a hint of asperity, last week). You can see that it is newish, but beyond that not a lot of clues. I was meeting an acquaintance at his office to go to lunch, walking up a mirror of the staircase you see across the atrium, and was struck by the cleanness of the lines, the bright blue cube chairs and toffee brown ottomans. The vista looked like an architect's rendering.
     Notice that most of the people here are men? I'm not sure if that helps or is a red herring.
     This time, the winner receives a blog poster, suitable for framing, signed and numbered, one of a dwindling stock, hand set on a letterpress in Nashville, Tennessee. Just put your guess in the comments, and I'll jump in and recognize the winner. Good luck. I haven't stumped you yet, but my hunch is, unless someone has actually been there, I just might this time. 

More than a wise, important rabbi: a good man

     There’s an old Jewish joke that goes like this: A revered rabbi, famous for his goodness and wisdom, dies and ascends to heaven. Such is his reputation that God Himself slides over to welcome the new arrival and ask him what heavenly reward he would like for a life well-lived.

     The rabbi considers this.

     “Well,” he says. “The journey was long, and I am hungry. So a roll. Yes, a fresh challah roll. That is what I want.”

     The Lord is amazed, and remarks to his angels: “See the pious simplicity of this holy man! He is offered the riches of heaven by God Almighty, and asks only for a roll.”

     The Lord turns back to the rabbi.

     “Truly, rebbe, is there nothing else you would like besides a challah roll?”

     “Well . . . ” says the rabbi, musing, “a little butter would be nice.”

     That isn’t the funniest joke, but it’s sweet. Which is why it comes to mind when I think of Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, who was regional director of Chabad in Illinois, the Illinois representative of the Lubavitch movement. It wasn’t so much that he was learned — he certainly was — or active, both within his community and as a liaison to the world beyond, promoting his brand of faith in an endless chain of services, events, celebrations, seminars, lunches.
     He was important, a leader. He guided his community, got things done, built a new Lubavitch center in Northbrook. But many rabbis are wise, active and important. That wasn’t why I admired him. It’s that he was a good man, kind, patient, even dealing with weak-tea Jews like me, constantly badgering him with questions that any learned 6-year-old should know. He taught me that you can use faith as a bludgeon, you can beat people up with it. You can use it as a measuring stick, to find how far others fall short. Or you can use it as a beacon and say, “Look, I have this really good thing here. Why don’t you try a nibble? Maybe you’ll like it.”
     Rabbi Moscowitz was a beacon.
     We met 15 years ago under difficult circumstances. I had put a jokey passing reference in my column to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch movement, who had died a few years earlier but was deeply esteemed. Rabbi Moscowitz called, not so much to complain — what good does that do?— as to discuss, to illuminate. By the time he was done, we were friends in my estimation; maybe he was so skilled at what he did that I was just another media source to be kept in line. But if that was the case, he fooled me.
     When I got the bad news Tuesday — he died unexpectedly, after gall bladder surgery, at 59 — I flashed on all the memories over the past decade and a half that I only have because of him. Sitting at his house at Shabbos, the candles glowing, him quizzing my older son — a bright boy! Among a circle of Hassidic men, our arms interlocked, dancing wildly at the wedding of one of his sons. Sitting with Rabbi Moscowitz in intense conversation at their luncheons after services. When I stopped drinking eight years ago, he phoned — not many friends did, but he did —and in our conversation said that, because of his health, he had to cut back wine too. But what can a person do? We do what we must. We endure.
     Over the years I would call him to ask questions: Why do we display lights at Hanukkah? What does the Jewish calendar represent — 5,700 or so years since what?
     My family attended services at his center, and his sermons were wise, witty, brief.
     When my wife and I were getting ready this week to go to his house to offer our condolences, the question arose: what to bring? You make a shiva call, you bring food. But it wouldn’t do to drag tref into a rabbi’s house.
     “Maybe some tangerines,” my wife said.
     “I don’t think fruit can be unkosher,” I replied. But we puzzled, unsure.
     “I’ll call Rabbi Moscowitz and ask,” I said, and she gasped. I had meant it as a sardonic comment on the void he leaves; he is no longer here to answer questions. She thought I was referring to his son, Rabbi Meir Moscowitz, following in his father’s footsteps.
     The confusion points toward the comfort in this tragedy. For Jews, our heaven is here on earth, our eternity is found in our children. Life and death are twins, we believe, brothers joined at the hip. It is ingratitude to celebrate one and decry the other.
     So we don’t rail at death. We accept it. Our good works live after us. Rabbi Moscowitz had nine children, countless friends and achievements. His memory will radiate onward, a blessing. And yet. Were he here, I’d tell him, “Yes, yes, but it’s still very hard.”
     “Of course it’s hard!” he’d reply, his eyes twinkling. “But what choice have we?”

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines..."

    Opining about the weather always struck me as the lowest rung of punditry, hinting at intellectual exhaustion on the part of a columnist. Some mark the seasons like primroses: greet the spring, celebrate the summer, plant a fingertip on their chin and grow reflective at the autumn then shiver through the winter. Rinse and repeat.
     I try not to be that guy.
     But damn ... this snow. This cold. Will it never end? I found myself, Wednesday morning, actually standing outside and shouting at the sky: "Stopppp...snowwwing!!!" Recognizing a meme when I saw it, I whipped out my cell phone and repeated my performance. I don't know whether my yell was less hollow on cue, or that I always sound that, well, constricted. But it didn't strike me as the raging, mad-as-hell, full-throated cri du coeur that I hoped for, and posting it on Facebook only confirmed my suspicions. 
     But lest you judge too harshly, go outside and yell at the sky. It's harder than you think.
     I have to write about the arctic chill today, because my only other option is writing about how much I hate the British government. Hate, hate, hate them. Brendan Behan has nothing on me, and he's the guy who wrote Confessions of an Irish Rebel, which has perhaps the best opening of any memoir, ever:  

      'You're for the Governor in the morning,' said this dreary red-headed little Welsh Methodist bastard of a screw.
     'Thanks for telling me,' said I, in an almost English accent, as sarcastically as I politely could, 'but I'm not for 'im in the morning or any other bloody time, you little Welsh puff.'

     This antipathy is new for me. Just since Tuesday in fact. I had a column idea — cities far larger than Chicago, undeniable "world-class" cities, also care about their images. What cities to pick? Easy, Paris and London. I called the French Tourist Board. No problem. Their director happened to be in Chicago, and a sub-director was found; any French organization is silly with sub-directors. He said nothing usable whatsoever, of course -- I had to turn to my friend Adam Gopnik, who was perfect -- but the point was, I had reached him.
     Could the British do that? Noooooo. The British consulate in Chicago has a beautiful GOV.UK web site, sleek and clean and utterly useless, except that it very quickly makes you understand why 1984 was written by a Brit. There's a phone number all right, but the phone puts you through shell hell leading nowhere, all the while urging you to go to their web site, where there's nothing about reaching a human being. 
     I tried other cities — Altanta, figuring things would be slower there, a bit more laid back, maybe they'd pick up the phone. New York and Washington, assuming they might have this whole communicate-with-the-press thing down pat. Nothing.  Every other web site I visit, almost without exception, has some little back door you find where, under warnings that only real live reporters on deadline should use this, a real phone number for a real person, or at least an email address to a real person. Not the Brits. It was a maddening experience, clicking this way and that, trying various tantalizingly-dangled phone numbers, getting the same perky recorded woman's voice straight out of "Brazil." It made me hate them, it really did. 
    Not that I was thwarted. A professional prevails. Abandoning the government, I found real Londoners easily enough -- you know how? -- Facebook, and some British business board in Chicago that answers their phone. And of course, the actual Brits turned out to be hale, stout folk one and all, so I'm not talking about the British people in my dance-on-your-grave contempt for those behind the government web site. My best friend is a Brit. Salt of the earth, the grandchildren of those East Enders who stepped out of the rubble of their homes tear their shirts open and scream at the departing German bombers: "Oh yeh? Yer dun and ruhnnin', now, are ya, ya fookin' Kraut coonts! C'm beck 'n give oos sum mahrrrr, cuz we can tek all ye'v gat 'n then rem it beck oop yer bleedin' Berliner backsides!!!!"  
    But the government, this web site, well, it makes me mad. They make the United States Postal Service seem as quick to help as an Apple clerk, as keen to please as a geisha. Maybe I'm arrogant -- the media, what's left of it, is known for that, and it might be true. We don't like to be thwarted. Who does? At some point you want a human goddamn being to answer a simple question about attitudes in London, a question that isn't on their FAQs and slick graphics. 
     And they failed. It truly snapped my mind, nearly — maybe the weather also played a hand — but I'm all for Scottish independence now. "Alba gu bràth!" Scotland forever! Vote aye, and send the jackbooted, non-communicative John Bulls back to the red hell they crawled out of in 1296.  Why would that lovely, peaty country of whiskey and draught horses want to continue being slaves to a bunch of mute arseholes, a pack of, well, I wasn't really thinking of Brendan Behan's relatively tame lines about his keeper while struggling with her majesty's web site.  I was thinking of D.H. Lawrence's classic assessment of his compatriots. Perhaps this is best read outside, if you can, into the pelting snow and killing wind, at full volume, facing East toward England:

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime. I could curse for hours and hours — God help me.

    I'll stop now. Blame the snow. And the cold. And its generally endlessness. I don't even look at the weather report; why bother? Because it's always the same. So blame that. Although Lawrence wrote the above in summer, in July 1912, after Sons and Lovers was rejected for publication. So maybe being thwarted by a web site — and Jesus, hire a few operators, will you, you cheap royalist bastards — isn't quite the same. But the depth of feeling is there. Don't fuck with writers, we'll curse you in a way that will haunt you through the centuries.
     

A world class city stands up for itself

     "Parisians,” said Adam Gopnik, who lived in the City of Light for years as the New Yorker’s man in Paris, “are hypersensitive to what’s being said about them, especially in the American press.” 

     Keep this in mind as Chicago finds itself in the national spotlight Thursday, and for eight weeks after, as CNN’s massive “Chicagoland” documentary unfolds.

     I haven’t seen a minute of it, but I can tell you, whatever the show offers, some Chicagoans will complain the city is maligned, then others will chime in that an actual world-class city doesn’t care how it looks on something so insignificant as a TV show.

     Which is just nonsense. 

     The fact is that everyone, every blessed soul in every city and town, big and small, cares how they look. It’s human nature.

     “I recall being shocked — really shocked — after I had been in Paris for about a year and written one of my mildly acidic/affectionate things about something, and found a whole piece about it that week in Le Monde,” Gopnik continued. “I had assumed my own invisibility — why would they care, they were Paris? But they did.”

     My experience is that any city will rise to its own defense. Last summer, after I noted the riots rippling across Rio de Janeiro, a city twice the size of Chicago, Rio’s mayor was angrily firing back that afternoon. (“Chicago is totally jealous of us,” Eduardo Paes said, calling Chicago “a cold horror of racial conflicts.”) Ditto for Toronto. 

     And why not? It isn’t being concerned about your image that’s provincial; it’s the idea that you shouldn’t be that is. The idea that somehow we don’t have the right to contradict anyone who unfairly judges us. 

     Last April, when The New York Times ran its excoriation of Chicago (and my memoir of it) written by a refugee from Gotham, complaining about her hardship post, Chicagoans flew to the city's defense only to hear a certain faint but unmistakable sighing—Tsk-tsk, bad form!—from those worried that in refuting slurs we tar ourselves as rustics.
      The worst example of this was in the Tribune on New Year's Day, as a writer tried to lead readers into a vow to next time bow our heads and receive any well-deserved condemnation from our betters without suffering them to hear any silly protests.
     "Say it with me," the author urged. "We, the people of Chicago, will not get apoplectic every time we are criticized. Even by New York. We will speak up for ourselves, and we will retain a sense of humor. And we will gain the confidence to not care so much."
     There was no cited instance of a Chicagoan reacting to criticism with apoplexy or lack of humor, and the writer came off as one of the chronically embarrassed, the restaurant table mate who cringes if you ask for a clean fork.
     When Gopnik left Paris, he returned to New York, another town we would assume plows on without a concern for how it's perceived. And usually it is, he said.
     "New York is a slightly different case, as it seemed mostly indifferent to outsider opinion, but even there the post-9/11 paranoia hit—was everyone admiring our resilience sufficiently?" Gopnik wrote to me. "So yes, Chicago is hardly alone in caring about outsiders' opinions— though Liebling might still well be right that its second-city (third city, now?) position makes it more thin-skinned about it than the rest."
    Hey! I thought, "thin-skinned?" Thin-skinned! And here I thought we were pals!!!
     Joking. The truth is, while some think indifference is the big-city ideal, everyone wants to be thought well of, though who you look to for validation does shift.
     "Londoners, if prodded, will probably admit they care about how other Londoners view them, but that's about it," wrote Noreen Marshall, a 40-year resident. "As far as people from anywhere else are concerned, they feel it's irrelevant. They know they're the best, and their city is the best."
     Andrew Bole, a native Londoner now consulting with McKinney Rogers here, elaborated that because London is such a conglomeration of nationalities, it has its own outside critics within, which makes it resemble another city of his acquaintance.
     "London is such a diverse international city, it's quite hard to say what an indigenous Londoner is," Bole said. "As a city of immigrants, London, to a certain extent, is quite like Chicago, a city of different neighborhoods. Rather like Chicago, people pay attention to their individual communities."
      Bole ended our talk by emphasizing one aspect about Chicago that Londoners can't quite grasp until they actually see the place: "How amazing it is." No argument here.