At least Billy Graham never embraced Stalin

     Let's be clear.
     I wasn't sorry about the amazing progress that the United States has made regarding gay rights over the past few years.

     A triumph for human dignity, a breakthrough accomplished far sooner than most would have guessed it might possibly occur.

     But I'm also a newspaper columnist, and one thought did cross my mind, just a few days ago, while gazing at an empty screen: as welcome as it is that all decent people suddenly realized it's cruel to oppress GLBT individuals and their families based on nothing more than musty theology, that does pluck one arrow out of my quiver. Good for society; not so good for those in the opinion business.
    Okay, I know. Boo hoo, it's like a medical writer complaining, after they cure cancer, because battling the disease was so interesting.
    So I don't welcome the news that burying the issue might be a tad premature. That it's too early to tuck away the issue on the shelf of dead social questions, along with Free Silver and the 8-hour workday.

Rev. Billy Graham

Rev. Franklin Graham

    On the other hand, I'm happy to be able to point out this: No sooner did I stand, pouting, over the loss of an issue, then good old Rev. Franklin Graham, Rev. Billy Graham's son, stumbled out of his Appalachian shack (or, more likely, mansion) lets out a howl and starts blowing kisses toward ... ready, wait for it ... Vladimir Putin, who, when he isn't seizing the land of his independent neighbors and denouncing the United States, is oppressing and murdering gay people in Russia.

    In a column in the Washington Post Monday titled "Franklin Graham's detestable anti-gay statements," Jonathan Capehart shines a flashlight into the well of a Graham op-ed from the end of February, where the evangelist muses how America once "held the moral high ground," but now that has been snatched by Putin who, despite being a godless communist, at least has the moral sense to protect children from the evil designs of homosexuals posing as their parents. Graham writes:

    Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda—Russia’s standard is higher than our own?
     In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

     "Gay agenda" is a giveaway term, like "lib," which tells you that the speaker has been driven insane by bias and partisan politics. Of course, Franklin Graham only joins a parade of Right Wing haters flocking to Putin. "The Russian president has some curious bedfellows on the fringes of European politics," the Economist wrote this week, "ranging from the creepy uniformed followers of Jobbik in Hungary to the more scrubbed-up National Front in France."
    Birds of a feather.
    Although "driven" insane might be the wrong verb to describe Franklin Graham's journey. At the risk of paraphrasing Lady Gaga, he was born this way, or at least raised this way.
      As much as I don't like to visit the sins of the father upon the son, in Franklin Graham's case, what can you really expect? If you consider the career of the Rev. Billy Graham, what comes into sharp focus is how his faith inspired him to be on the wrong side of literally every significant moral issue of his time. He sat out the civil rights protests of the 1950s, preferring to baptize Eisenhower and turn up his nose at those “addicted to sitting, squatting, demonstrating, and striking for what they want.” In 1960, he rebuffed John F. Kennedy's pleas to tell his Protestant flock that they wouldn't go to Hell if they voted for a Catholic. He linked arms with Lyndon Johnson and mocked those protesting the Vietnam War. He was Nixon's apologist and lackey all through Watergate, nodding in approval and murmuring "amen" while Tricky Dicky raged against his enemies, including "The Jews." If Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and Sam Harris spent a month in a cabin working feverishly together, they couldn't come up with a greater indictment illustrating the ethical blindness that can go hand-in-hand with fervent religious faith than the career of Rev. Billy Graham.

     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” Martin Marty wrote of Graham in the Sun-Times in 1965.

    Nearly half a century later, that sentence, true for the father, is now true for the son. With Billy Graham in his extreme age—he's 95— Franklin has picked up the baton. Barack Obama obviously won't let him come to the White House and whisper in his ear. Maybe Vladimir Putin will.
     Give Billy Graham credit for that much -- when Harry Truman banned him from the White House, at least he didn't try to make friends with Joseph Stalin. But then what son doesn't want to surpass his father? It is more his tragedy than ours that Franklin Graham has decided to rival his dad in combining moral myopia with fawning over power. Perhaps someday we'll see Franklin Graham standing before the cameras in Red Square, talking to the media about getting on his knees with Vladimir Putin. It's in his blood.

South Shore works site developer vies for Obama library

McCaffery senior project manager Nasutsa Mabwa at the South Works site.

     It could almost be a lonely spot on the far Michigan shore, with the blue-gray lake and the brown grass, scattered copses, bare trees swaying in the steady breeze. The dunes maybe.

     But north, there’s the skyline of Chicago, looming like Oz, and west, a massive wall, 30 feet tall and 2,000 feet long, which held ore off-loaded from barges when this was U.S. Steel’s South Works. Once the vibrant heart of Midwest manufacturing, it is now, and for the past 20 years, both a white elephant and a tantalizing possibility.

     Nearly 600 acres — almost the size of New York’s Central Park — of prime lakefront, where East 86th Street approaches Lake Michigan. Or remote lakefront, depending on your view. For developer Dan McCaffery, this is where Chicago’s newest neighborhood is about to spring into being, anchored by Barack Obama’s presidential library.

     “It’s so beautiful,” said McCaffery, who has been working with U.S. Steel for the past decade getting the property ready for development — the South Lake Shore Drive extension that opened in October was a major step.

     The Obama library is a greased pig that many are scrambling for: the University of Chicago, in the lead, but also the University of Illinois at Chicago and, trailing behind, Chicago State. A committee of the Illinois House voted Thursday to put $100 million on the table to try to make sure the library doesn’t go to Hawaii, Obama’s home state.

     One benefit of the South Works site: There is nothing there. A velodrome — a banked bike track — somewhat improbably, and the wall, which would have to be blown up. That’s about it. The drawback: It isn’t on the city radar. Not yet.
“Imagine this,” McCaffery said."If you were getting 1.5 million visitors a year down there. Navy Pier is our number one tourist destination. . . . Put a hydrofoil [boat] station at Navy Pier, and a hydrofoil station right in front of the library, walk up these grand stairs."
     Which raises the question of how many visitors an Obama library would draw. The Lincoln library in Springfield, a Disney-esque attraction built around our most beloved president, pulls in 315,000 visitors a year. Reagan does a little better. But Nixon only draws 90,000. That isn't as many visitors as hit Wrigleyville on any summer weekend. I could see the library kick-starting a vibrant new neighborhood. Or I could see it perched by itself on a lonely, windblown promontory.
     This is an area where I'm a notoriously bad judge. I remember walking along Navy Pier, back when it was a debris-strewn ruin, and thinking, "What kind of idiots are wasting their money by trying to turn this remote stretch of nowhere into some kind of pleasure dome? Nobody is going to want to come out here."
     Most popular tourist attraction in the state — nearly 9 million visitors, about twice as many as second-place Millennium Park.
     McCaffery is pushing the site to "whoever will listen," and is placing a formal proposal when requests are due June 16.
     "It is an area of town that is 2 miles from Michelle's house, 4 miles from his current house," McCaffery said. "A mile from where he was a community organizer."
Fair enough. But what if history judges Obama as closer to Nixon than Lincoln?
     "His library, I'm quite confident, is going to be a longtime draw," he said. "It is no small thing that this is the first man of color to be the president of the United States."
He's a lot more than that. Between health care, eliminating Osama bin Laden and ending two wars, Obama's museum will have a lot of exciting stuff in it, and if every Chicago public school kid visits once a year, that's 400,000 visitors right there. You can almost squint and see the buses lining up.
     But is this the place? "Far" is relative. I kept thinking of the Wrigley Building. It isn't an accident that it is gleaming white, glazed terra cotta, lit at night with flood lamps. That was done because, when it was built in 1921, there were no office buildings north of the river. Michigan Avenue had recently been Pine Street, a seedy area of warehouses and factories.  The Wrigley Building was designed to catch people's attention, to lure them across the river.      It had a restaurant and a bank so tenants could have services nearby. It worked. The city grew around it. That could happen here too.
     "To me, this is more than a site," McCaffery said. "This is an opportunity for a new city, that espouses all of the things he has spoken about during his presidency."
A daring, future-oriented move that some would immediately condemn as folly. That hasn't stopped Obama in the past. I took a good look around and tried to imagine the library, the townhouses, the neighborhood. Stranger things have happened in Chicago.

Chicagopedia returns! Ballon frame, goo-goo, Chicagoland and more.

The Sun-Times decided to revive Chicagopedia, an occasional definition of words and phrases of particular interest to Chicagoans. I kicked in four for the debut (click on the link to read my take on "Chicagoland"), including the one below, and plan to write a new one every week. I hope they're half as fun to read as they are to write. 

Editor's note: the paper's link is down, and the entries aren't on Nexis, so we'll have to settle for this one. Apologies.

balloon frame: (BAH-loon frehm) adj.
A technique of constructing buildings using a light lattice of sawed timbers, typically two-by-fours, as opposed to heavier posts and beams found in European mortise and tenon construction. Pioneered in Chicago in the early 1830s by carpenter Augustine Deodat Taylor. Detractors coined the “balloon” name in derision, suggesting light construction would make them blow away in the first strong wind. And they were so easy to take apart, they were nearly portable: an early balloon frame building, the city’s first Catholic church (St. Mary’s Church), at State and Lake, was taken down and relocated three times in 10 years to follow its shifting congregation. The technique allowed homes to be built far faster and cheaper than before, permitting the rapid growth of the city, and they spread quickly, not only across the city, but also the world. Today, three-quarters of the homes built in the United States are made of balloon frame construction, and the method is one of Chicago’s greatest contributions to modern life, though few realize it. – Neil Steinberg

Saturday fun: Where IS this?

     As soon as I stepped into this singular space I thought, "Maybe this will stump them." 
     Not too many clues. We are in Chicago. The structure I'm in is 30 feet tall and 2,000 feet long. It's part of something even larger, or was. You're certainly heard of it, but probably never been there. Few people have, lately. Otherwise, I'll tell you more about it after someone guesses the right answer.
     Or doesn't.
     Where is this? As always, the winner receives one of the ever-dwindling stock of this blog's way-cool, ultra-collectible-someday-perhaps poster. Post your guesses in the comments section below. 

Getting support the old-fashioned way: buying it.

     "The machine,” political guru Don Rose said, years ago, “could get 30 percent of the black votes for George Wallace over Martin Luther King.”

     Though we don’t have to raise hypotheticals. When the actual Dr. King actually did bring his open occupancy marches to Chicago, there was no shortage of black aldermen willing to rise in City Council and denounce King as an unwelcome outsider, their strings pulled by Richard J. Daley.

     Let me be clear: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go. The Republican Party will deny global warming until the ocean laps at Pittsburgh simply because doing something about it crosses the immediate profit of the coal burners and oil companies and carbon spouters who write the checks. No tobacco company has any trouble finding people who, at a hefty salary, stare into the camera and say no, all that lung cancer stuff is just fiction.

     Still, knowing this, I had to smile, broadly at Mike Sneed’s item Thursday on Hermene Hartman, publisher of an obscure Chicago African-American periodical, N’DIGO, who pocketed $51,000 of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner’s bottomless pail of money and then decided, my God, he’s the man to back, the billionaire with a heart of gold that beats in time to the hopes of the black community. She wrote a lengthy tribute to Rauner’s “fresh approaches,” never mentioning the money she pocketed.

     That’s not a “fresh approach.” That’s the oldest, stalest, machine, buy ’em-a-beer-and-get-’em-to-the-polls approach.
     Though before I get down to the business of mocking Hartman, I should admit my own bias. Not monetary, but emotional. I'm the guy who, in 2011, wrote a column making fun of Hartman for running a poll that, she claimed, showed Carol Moseley Braun would beat Rahm Emanuel.  The poll was conducted among readers of her paper—African-American women, mostly— and while 27 percent did pick Braun, 23 percent chose Emanuel. To me, that clearly meant not eventual victory for Braun, but that Emanuel was taking nearly a quarter of black women, and he was going to crush her.
     In doing so, I also took a few choice shots at the local black leadership, which dithered about a "consensus candidate" and pointed out, with respect, that Harold Washington hadn't actually accomplished much as mayor (two readers argued this, citing sidewalks he put in front of their homes).
     Hartman's minions picketed the paper. You can see the video online. Protesters, with signs, demanded that I be fired as a racist, for pointing out the truth.
     Were this mere personal payback, I hope I'd manage to resist. But there is the larger issue here, of Rauner buying not just Hartman but a community. Lots of ministers with roofs to repair. I'd like to hear from any black Illinoisan—who's not in Rauner's direct employ—who thinks that arrogant rich guy is the man to run the state. And yes, Rev. Meeks, letting him jet you to his Montana ranch for a fly-fishing weekend, wine and dine and flatter and promise God knows what, counts as employ, though Hartman cut a better deal. Bad enough to sell out; worse to sell out for scraps. (Asked by Mark Brown about how he met Rauner, Meeks laughed and said, "When I saw how much money he was worth, I said, 'Sure, let the guy come on.' ")
    And come on Rauner has, checks flying.
     Will it work? That all depends. As much as people like to be bought, they still chafe at seeing their leaders bought. I don't think Rauner has raised himself so much as brought Hartman low, or lower, which I would not have thought possible.
     Gov. Pat Quinn has flaws. He's sleepy and shambolic, buffeted trying to keep the state together. But say what you will of him, he doesn't have to buy friends. Rauner is going to run TV ads until your eyes shrivel, saying how being rich, having no experience in government, he's the man to lead us. He's saying we should trust him. But I don't trust him. Then again, I haven't been paid $51,000 by his campaign — please don't offer; I couldn't take it. My boss would get mad.
     Here. I'll give Hartman more sympathy than she ever gave me: She's trying to save that rag of a paper, made a deal with the devil and is ashamed to admit it. I would be, too. Not much help for $51,000. Which leads here: If Rauner is willing to throw his own money away like this, what's he going to do when he gets his hands on ours?

A surprise arrival at this year's Seder: not Elijah, but the Palestinians

     Religion is supposed to impose hardships and obligations. That’s the whole point.  Fulfilling them, you earn your spot on the team. It’s a kind of hazing.

     Thus I look at puzzlement at those who rip through their Seders in an hour. Why not dye Easter eggs while you’re at it? What’s the rush? My kin do the full, six-hour, sail-past-midnight, 14-point, Kiddush-to-conclusion Passover meal, with frequent pauses for questions and comments and readings.

     At the Seder, we tell of Exodus, the flight from Egypt. Thus much about freedom from biblical bondage and from smaller, modern slaveries. Monday we ceremoniously shut off our cellphones. I read Shelley’s ode to the futility of ego, “Ozymandias,” whose shattered pharaoh’s “sneer of cold command” surveys the empty sands. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

     So not just our Egyptian slavery, but slavery in its many forms. My wife read the Emancipation Proclamation, and we spoke about the lingering pernicious influence of black slavery. Native Americans got their due. Other ostracized groups too; women were mentioned. An orange on the Seder plate, used to symbolize the inclusion of women, now is applied to gays and lesbians. We don’t confine our left leaning to pillows.
     One by one, suffering groups were named. Slowly, something began to dawn on me.
     It jelled during the answer to the Four Questions: "We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Eternal our God brought us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Now if God had not brought out our forefathers from Egypt, then even we, our children, and our children's children, might still have been enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt."
     Hmm. "Our children and our children's children." That made me think of a particular group not being drawn under the blanket of liberal Jewish goodwill toward everyone oppressed. I sucked my front teeth and pondered. Just my loving family here. No risk. And yet. Should I? Nobody likes someone siding with the enemy. The day before, two Jewish centers in Kansas were shot up; we sympathized with those victims, too, even though they weren't Jewish. Big-hearted people, embattled people, that's us.
     At one point in the Seder, you flick a few drops out of your wine glass to symbolize, among other things, the suffering of the Egyptians, perishing so we could be free.
     "You know, " I finally announced, "we don't have to go back to biblical times to find people suffering so we can be free. Metaphors are imperfect, and they certainly aren't slaves. But as I'm reading this, all the 'stranger in a land not their own' business, I can't help but think of the Palestinians."
     Silence. Everybody looked at me. I pushed onward. "The question I always ask is: 'What's going to happen next?' Because both sides get lost rehashing history. I'm not saying to put a bowl of chickpeas on the Seder plate to represent the Palestinians. But why not mention them? This is about freedom, and Israel is being pushed, however unwillingly, into the Pharaoh role. The world increasingly sees them as Pharaoh, and not without justification. That's bad. We need to do all we can so Israel doesn't become Pharaoh." Or words to that effect.
     Is that bad? What's the point of being Jewish? To eat matzo balls and spend six hours — or 60 minutes — conducting a ritual meal, pausing to recount what a raw deal we had in Egypt 3,000 years ago? And how great it is for us to be free now and how we care so deeply about the freedom of every marginal group on the planet except for the one we have a hand in oppressing, since doing so would question our loyalty to the spunky little nation we so love that has done us proud, the past decade notwithstanding?
     Three choices: The 4.5 million Palestinians either, a) form their own state, b) remain captive in an expanding Jewish state, or c) are assimilated and the state isn't Jewish anymore. The first option is best —75 percent of Israelis support it. The second is the status quo and untenable over time. The third is bad only if being Jewish means something beyond representing just another flavor of self-interest.
     I thought Jews were supposed to stand for something more. I thought, having suffered, we are attuned to suffering. That having been slaves, we should then be reluctant pharaohs. If nothing happens, the problem will be handed to our children and our children's children. Not to minimize the difficulty, but Exodus was easy in comparison. There God helped. This he has left to us. Something to think about while nibbling your matzo this week: If Jews are so smart, why can't we figure this out?

Flight 370 and Samuel Johnson: The Untold Connection

     Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ... is ... umm ... still missing. 
     That said, I ... ah ... wanted to add that its disappearance is an ... umm ... hugely significant cultural moment. 
    Oh wait, my pal, Gene Weingarten, over at the Washington Post, put it best, in an email chiding me for under-appreciating the news value of the plane's disappearance: "I hunger for the story...this is a world-class, possibly never seen before, amp set to 11, bona fide mystery."
    I think that too! Err, now  I mean. I think that now.
    Sigh.
    No I don't. 
    I believe we project our desire for order, for wonder, for elaborate, clever artifice, on sketchy, poorly-understood events, so we can entertain ourselves with the amazing possibilities while the banal truth remains hidden. If I had to bet the ranch on what happened to Flight 370, I would guess the wing fell off. Or something overheated and blew up. Or a pilot spilled his Coke on the controls. We'll probably never know.
     Which I would never even bother to say, here, now.
     So why am I writing about this a second day?
     Well, you see....
     It's like this....
     I happily posted my column here Tuesday on CNN leaping from news coverage into performance art regarding the missing plane, all for a bump in ratings.
     "They're creating a little Theater of Exaggeration, trying to fool us," I wrote, of CNN's constant panting updates about what turns out to be nothing.
     Then Tuesday morning, I glanced at my stats, as I always do. Yowza! Through the roof. Twice what I get on a typical morning.  Fifty people retweeted. My very first, unfiltered thought was: "Geez, I should hit this again."
      Grin of embarrassment. 
      I wonder how many journalists, myself included, if we were suddenly in CNN's position, would do what CNN has done? (I like to think that, even if I did decide to pander, I'd pander more artfully than that. Self-awareness, and reluctance, I hope, balms the sting of today's pandering. Bad enough to be a whore, but to be a desperate, delusional whore...)
     But this is a business. And you have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it. If people really want tripe...
     No, no, no. I didn't write that! We can't conclude that. Hypocrisy is a bad thing. Being a hypocrite because it pays is worse. 
    Or is it? There can be a fine line between hypocrisy and ... ah ... flexibility. 
    My hero, Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham of Literature, produced his namesake dictionary in 1755.  It made him famous but not rich -- that next year, he was arrested for a £5 debt (which, admittedly, was a lot more 250 years ago than today). 
     In 1762, King George III granted him a lifetime pension of £300 a year, which would allow Johnson to pay off his debts and live comfortably, even well. But first he had to get around one uncomfortable point. In his dictionary, he famously defined "pension" thus: "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." 
     He was naturally torn, not only by the stench of hypocrisy, but by the idea that he was being bought off by a government he had criticized. He quizzed his friends. "Certainly the definitions in his Dictionary were not applicable to him," Joshua Reynolds replied. "It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done," said Lord Bute, who had lobbied the king on Johnson's behalf.
    Johnson took the pension. 
    His enemies of course gleefully mocked him, but they were doing that at every opportunity anyway. Johnson later said he wished the pension had been twice as much, so his critics could make "twice as much noise."
     So tomorrow, whatever the ratings, I shift away from Flight 370. It's the right thing to do. And there's no money at stake. That helps.