The politics of Porgy

      You can’t write about Chicago and not be interested in race, and I tend to write about African-American issues more than most white columnists do because I find them so important and I’m too reckless to avoid it. Thus when “Porgy and Bess” opened in Chicago in 2008, I saw my chance to explore something that fascinates me: is the depiction of any group exclusively controlled by that particular group, or can others jump in with their perspectives? Obviously, I have a dog in that race. This column appeared six years ago, but Friday I attended the dress rehearsal of "Porgy and Bess" at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and feel it is still as current. I wrote the full word that Ira Gershwin cut in 1952; I remember being aghast when my editor at the Sun-Times dashed it, and consider the use of the eusystolism “n-word” a strange and temporary bit of infantilizing, itself offensive, a white-washing of history (and, sadly, current events) for the exquisite sensibilities of a few. If I can be shown photographs of naked Jewish corpses piled high a Dachau, then black readers can stumble across “nigger” in “Huckleberry Finn.” The world needn’t be wallpapered for the sake of children, particular of the things that are being obscured help guide them to understand how it actually was, and is. That word certainly jolts, but I believe it is a necessary jolt.
     Which is why “Porgy and Bess” is still valuable and always timely, since six years make this column not at all out-of-date; I also added a line I learned researching my contest questions about tickets being given a way free to the 1952 production to try to overcome public reluctance to see what was, at the time, seen as practically a minstrel show. And the music, I hasten to add, is sublime. I was whistling “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” all day Saturday.

     A love story between a "lonely cripple" and a "liquor-guzzling slut," set against a backdrop of drug addiction, gambling, murder, mangled syntax and inescapable poverty whose sweetest moment, the opening number "Summertime," is a lullaby sung to a baby who will pass through the hands of three mothers before the play is over. 

     No, "Porgy and Bess" is not exactly a brochure published by the NAACP, and as if its subject matter weren't awkward enough, it was written by three white guys: two Jews, George and Ira Gershwin, and a Southerner, DuBose Heyward.
     Yet, a funny thing happened to this great American opera between its controversial debut on Broadway in 1935 and the magnificent production that opens Tuesday at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.
     "Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself," sniffed critic Virgil Thomson, "which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935."
     Thomson touches the heart of the issue, not only with "Porgy and Bess," but with a range of cultural flare-ups. Do we judge work by its content or by its creator? Does culture belong to the group that formed it, or can others borrow it for a while?
     Some say they can't. It isn't that Chief Illiniwek's dance is any worse than what's performed every weekend at Native American gatherings; it's that their heritage is being seized and exploited by someone else. Elvis didn't popularize black music; he stole it.
     "Porgy" received the same criticisms.
     "A white man's version of black folkways and characterizations from which their race has fought so painfully to escape," Douglas Watt wrote in the New Yorker. When the opera was performed in the early 1950s in Chicago, civil rights resistance against “Porgy and Bess” was so high that producers had to give away the first week’s worth of tickets—28,000 seats—to get an audience into the opera house.
     My problem with that view is that it's a kind of segregation, suggesting that blacks can only appreciate, understand and write about blacks, and whites can only appreciate, understand and write about whites, because of some barrier that forbids them from peering across and recognizing each other.
     Thus "I Got Plenty of Nothin' " is racially suspect, since the Gershwins imply happy-go-luckiness in Porgy, while—for example—"Baby's Got Back" can't be a racial slur because Sir Mixalot is black.
     That is a political, not an artistic, analysis. I kept thinking about how a disabled advocate would view Porgy, who says things like, "When God make cripple, He mean him to be lonely," and the answer depends on how much you demand that your art flatter your sensibilities. I can enjoy "The Merchant of Venice" even though Shylock isn't the image of the ideal Jew (but then again, those battles are mostly won, while mocking the disabled still carries less stigma than slurring Jews or blacks. The word "cripple" is used again and again in "Porgy;" the word "nigger" was cut out by Ira Gershwin in 1952).
     The bottom line is that African-American artists embraced the work. Both Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier — neither a cream-puff — sang Porgy. The entire cast is black, as required by the Gershwin estate — in reaction, the story goes, to the horror of Al Jolson pushing to cast himself as a blackface Porgy. (Except for several minor white roles. The whites are the only characters that speak instead of sing—both a stroke of genius and the only racial jab in the production.)
     While a Lyric audience usually has the racial diversity of a Blackhawks game, "Porgy" is a chance to change that, and it was gratifying to see busloads of CPS high school students brought in for Friday's dress rehearsal. At intermission, I talked to a group from Whitney Young, and asked what they thought of the show.
     "Being young, we know some of the stuff they're talking about," said Gillian Asque, 17, a junior, adding that it's "not your usual boring opera."
     Seeing the opera moots all debate. The music transcends, the songs haunt and thrill. The production is lavish — the lighting throws a warm summer South Carolina glow, the shimmery burnt orange slip of a dress that Bess first appears in deserves credit in the program. Ultimately, while the negative elements focused on by those ready to dismiss it are certainly there, so are their opposites. Yes, we have Porgy and Bess, but there are also Clara and Jake — Clara singing to her baby, Jake fishing every day to pay for the baby's college.
     Yes, we have two of the creepiest villains you'll ever see on stage — the sweaty, big-bellied, murderous Crown, and the wiry, lavender-suited, yellow-vested, Sportin' Life, brandishing packets of cocaine like a magician producing a dove.
    But they face their opposites. "Friends with you, low life?" sneers the shopkeeper, driving off Sportin' Life with a meat cleaver. "Hell no."
     There is gambling, but also baptism, at a joyous church picnic where a single verse sums up the appeal of the moral path more succinctly than I've ever heard it summed up before: "I ain't got no shame doing what I like to do."
     When the hurricane hits in the third act, and the grand stage at the Lyric is filled with humanity, on its knees before the wrath of nature, lightning casting stark shadows of their outstretched arms, appealing to the mercy of heaven, they are not black people, not poor people, but just people, and "Porgy and Bess," like all art, transcends its characters and its setting, its era and ours, and is above all else a story, about men and women, ennobled by love, undone by death, bowed yet brave. To say Porgy reflects poorly on blacks is like saying Medea reflects poorly on Greeks because, you know, she kills her kids.
     I left there overwhelmed by a love story between a simple, sweet-hearted man and a vivacious, tortured woman, set against a backdrop of strong community, suffering, hard work, joyous faith and unbreakable hope. And contrary to every critic who has written about "Porgy and Bess" over the last 70 years, I think he gets to New York and he finds her.
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times Nov. 17, 2008

Photos courtesy of Todd Rosenberg Photography.     

  

Give Derrick Rose a break

   

      I don't comment on professional sports much, because I have no depth of knowledge there.
     Besides, there are so many people already commenting about sports, there's little left unsaid, and it seems piling on to try.
     However.
     I do watch all the Bulls games, and have for several years.
     We try to go a few times a year—we went to the recent game against the Cavs, so my wife could lay eyes upon LeBron James.
    And I have actually met Derrick Rose. Quiet man. At least with the press. And for good reason.
     This is the thing about the media talking to athletes. 
     They're famous for spouting the lamest cliched crap. All that "team effort" bullshit, all those "we have to try to score more points than them while keeping them from scoring more than us" obviousness.
     Sometimes sports writers cry out for one sentence that is honest, this is real, that is heartfelt.
     And then Rose says something, regarding his limited playing time, that is both candid and sensible:
     “I feel I’ve been managing myself pretty good. I know a lot of people get mad when they see me sit out. But I think a lot of people don’t understand that when I sit out, it’s not because of this year. I’m thinking about long term. I’m thinking about after I’m done with basketball, having graduations to go to, having meetings to go to. I don’t want to be in my meetings all sore or be at my son’s graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. Just learning and being smart.’’

     Sure, in one sense that cuts across the sports ethic. You're supposed to dive headfirst for the ball, not worry about climbing stairs when you're 40. That's not what you pull down the millions for. 

     But you'd think he spat on the flag.

     "That's just flat-out stupid," Charles Barkley said on "Inside the NBA."“Derrick Rose is making $20 million a year. He’s got a couple of bad knees. That’s disrespectful to maids, people who are in the army who go out and kill people and get killed. They got no arms and no legs."

     Yes, some people supported him.

     "What an honest, reasonable and level-headed answer," Stephen Douglas wrote on "The Big Lead." 

     So there's no need for me to gild the lily here. I just wanted to observe the hypocrisy of this. Here every sports page in America is wondering aloud whether professional football should continue, given the toll taken by concussions, and at that exact moment one injury-plagued professional athlete admits he thinks about his life to come, and would like to avoid permanently crippling himself, and he's accused of lacking determination, which obviously isn't the case for Rose, who has laboriously built himself back, twice, while maintaining a dignified public demeanor. 

     Rose said he "couldn't care less" about the criticisms and I hope that's true. But it would seem to be the lesson here is keep your mouth shut and your true thoughts to yourself, and serve up the same bland bromides everybody else parrots. That's a sad lesson.

     

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I had driven that road for years. But maybe I had never stopped at that particular light before, and never looked in that particular direction.
     But there he was. 
    Abraham Lincoln, seated on a park bench, of all places, idling the afternoon away, watching traffic.
     Which I think he deserves. 
     Here, I'll blow it up a bit. Lincoln, right? On a blue sofa, more than a bench. 
     He's on a fairly busy street, so I don't imagine he'll stump you for long.
     Nothing seems to stump you.
     Forget "seems."
     Nothing stumps you.
     Period.
     But I'm working on it.
     I'm sort of hoping whoever cracks this can fill me in a bit on this Lincoln.
     Which is my way of being lazy, because I could just drive there, park and, one expects, finds a plaque or something.
     But who has time for that?
     Anyway, where is this place? 
     The winner will receive a bag of fine Bridgeport coffee. They are now an official sponsor of this blog; I would draw your attention to their advertisement, and encourage you to drink it. I do.
     Please post your guesses below. Good luck. 

   

Jane Byrne, Chicago's first woman mayor, dies.

     Jane Byrne was not mighty, like her mentor, Richard J. Daley.
     She was not beloved, like her successor, Harold Washington.
     Nor was she long-serving, like her bitter rival, Richard M. Daley.
     But she was mayor, Chicago’s first and only female mayor — making Chicago the largest city in the United States to elect a female chief executive — serving a single, tempestuous term, ushering the city into the 1980s, leaving her own colorful legacy during a time of political change, social upheaval and financial crisis.
     Byrne, 81, died Friday in hospice care. She had been in poor health in recent years, suffering a stroke in January 2013.
     The average Chicagoan recalling the Jane Byrne era remembers her for the popular city traditions she initiated — she loved parties and lavish entertainments. She created the festival that became Taste of Chicago and initiated the return of farmers markets to downtown.
     She was famous for moving into one of the Cabrini Green high-rises and living there, briefly, in an effort to draw attention to gang violence in public housing. She also pushed to ban handguns in Chicago.
     Crime was just one of many serious urban problems Byrne faced. During her first three months in office, unions representing the city's transit workers, public school teachers and firefighters each went on strike, one after the other.
     Labor strife was among the blows that hard reality struck after the thrill of her election, a stunning victory — the defeat of a sitting mayor, Michael Bilandic, by a 5-foot-3 woman who, 16 months earlier, had been Chicago's first commissioner of consumer sales, weights and measures, not exactly the kind of job that traditionally serves as a launching pad for political glory.    
      "I beat the whole goddamned Machine single-handed!" Byrne exulted when she won the Democratic nomination in February 1979, upsetting Bilandic, who had famously left the streets unplowed following a major snowstorm that dumped two feet of snow on the city, snarling roads, stopping trains and closing the airports. Making Byrne's victory all the more sweet was the fact it had been Bilandic who fired her from her city job after she accused his administration of shady dealings with taxicab companies.
     The Democratic primary was the true race, as usual in Chicago, with the general election a mere formality. That spring, Byrne crushed Republican Wallace Johnson with a staggering 82 percent of the vote, the biggest majority in modern Chicago mayoral history. It was the first time since 1927 that the candidate slated by the Democratic machine didn't win the mayor's office.
     Byrne prevailed despite the considerable sexism of the time. She was openly and unapologetically mocked by her enemies in such terms as "that crazy broad" and "that skinny bitch" and worse, slurs that wounded her.
     She felt that her difficult term in office was made even more so because of her gender.
     "There is always a testing of the new kid on the block in politics," she wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "My Chicago." "I was certain the testing was a bit tougher because of my sex."
     Winning as a maverick who had bucked the system, Byrne initially pushed for reform. But after being thwarted in her attempts to advance her agenda, she was drawn to the power structure she had fought against.
     "She was somewhat overwhelmed by her victory and to an extent frightened by it," remembered Don Rose, a key adviser. "She found the easy way was to be led by the [Ald. Edward] Vrdolyaks and [CHA Chairman Charles] Swibels into the swamp of the old politics."
     The Tribune once referred to her administration as "a Bonnie and three Clydes," the third Clyde being John D'Arco, alderman of the mob-ridden 1st Ward.
     "An erratic and stormy person, she kept the city quaking during her first administration," wrote Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. "Appointees hired and fired without rhyme or reason whirled in and out of the revolving doors."
     "As mayor, she proved a great disappointment," Leon Despres, the progressive 5th Ward alderman, wrote, noting that she "entered office on a wave of popular support" having triumphed over the Machine, which she called "an evil cabal."
     But she abruptly cut a deal with the aldermen who ran the Council.
     "From then on, she was more their captive than their executive," Despres wrote.
     Time, though, softened the trials of the Byrne years, and when she turned 81 she was remembered fondly by the city she led, with the Circle Interchange and the park next to the Water Tower named in her honor.
     The future mayor was born Margaret Jane Burke on May 24, 1933. She graduated from St. Scholastica High School in 1951 ("Janie Burke: Neat and nice" her yearbook dubbed her) and enrolled in St. Mary of the Woods in Terre Haute, Indiana, but the next year transferred to Barat College in Lake Forest because she missed her family. She studied science: biology and chemistry.
     On New Year's Eve 1956, she married a Marine pilot, Bill Byrne, and moved to Pensacola, Florida, while her husband took flight training. The couple later moved to Kingsville, Texas.
     Three years later, in May 1959, Byrne was with their daughter, Katherine, visiting her mother in Chicago when Bill Byrne was killed after his plane crashed into a cemetery while trying to land at the Glenview Naval Air Station.
     Her sister Carol had opened the Chicago office for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, and Byrne began working there, eager to put a fellow Catholic in the White House. After Kennedy's assassination, she was taken under the wing of Richard J. Daley, though their first meeting did not go well.
     "Why did you go to them?" Daley asked her, indignant she had not instead applied her efforts to her local Democratic organization. "The Kennedys. Why did you go to them?" The meeting almost ended with Byrne angrily storming out of the mayor's office, but Daley called her back and a bond was formed, once she promised to ring doorbells and put up signs in her ward.
     In 1964, he put her on the Chicago Commission on Urban Opportunity, the city's reaction to Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty.
     Daley helped advance her career while she helped him by showing, during an era of growing feminism, that the Daley administration had women in positions of authority. He'd ask her "What do you hear out there?" and she would tell him.
     In 1968, she became chairman of the Department of Consumer Sales, Weights and Measures. She also rose in the Democratic Party, becoming a national committeewoman.
     She remarried, on St. Patrick's Day 1978, to Jay McMullen, a colorful Sun-Times reporter who had publicly praised her "great legs" and whose relationship with the future mayor was not without practical journalistic value.
     "There was a day when I could roll over in bed and scoop the Tribune," he told Esquire magazine at the time of their marriage.
     After her election, with the city awash in red ink, Byrne tried to save money on labor by paring city employees' cost-of-living increases. The result was widespread labor unrest: In December 1979, the transit union struck; in January 1980, Chicago Public School teachers went on strike; in February, it was the firefighters' turn.
     "To her discredit, Byrne handled all three strikes — transit, teachers, and firemen — in what to the public seemed to be a vacillating, then vindictive, and sometimes mean and small-minded manner," wrote Chicago historian Melvin Holli. "In all three affairs newsmen and the unions unflatteringly referred to her as 'Attila the Hen' or 'Calamity Jane.'"
     Byrne also drank, and certain decisions in office seemed to have been affected by that; many reporters had the experience of the inebriated mayor calling up to air a concern.
     She later admitted she had difficulty taking command.
     "At times I felt whipsawed and all but helpless in my effort to shake Chicago out of its inertial patterns," she wrote in her autobiography.
      The achievements of her administration included extending the 'L' line to O'Hare, where she began a $1 billion expansion project, as well as initial planning for the renewal of Navy Pier.
     There were also missteps. She promoted the ill-starred idea to put the city's main library in an abandoned Goldblatt's store, a plan scuttled only after a Sun-Times investigation showed the department store floors could not support the weight of books. She also pushed hard for a 1992 World's Fair in Chicago that, like a 2016 Chicago Olympics, was not to be.
     In 1983, she amassed a $9 million campaign war chest but was challenged in the Democratic primary by the Cook County state's attorney, Richard M. Daley, and Rep. Harold Washington, whose candidacy was in part provoked by Byrne herself, by her firing of two black members of the CHA board.
     "Some insiders felt that Byrne goaded the African-American community to put forward a black candidate that would take away from Rich Daley's support in the primary," Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga wrote. "If so, she made a drastic political mistake."
     Chicagoans turned out en masse for the February 1983 primary. Washington narrowly won, with 37 percent of the vote to Byrne's 33 percent and Daley's 30 percent.
     After Washington's first term, Byrne ran against him in 1987 in a bitter primary that saw her calling Washington a "disgrace" and Washington accusing Byrne of being "psychologically unfit" to be mayor and comparing her rhetoric to Hitler's.
     Outspent 6 to 1, Byrne lost to Washington, 47 to 53 percent.
     She flirted with running in 1989 but did not file the necessary petitions. In 1991 she did file but had difficulty raising funds—during one period, she raised $798 to Mayor Daley's $2.2 million.
     Jay McMullen died of lung cancer in 1992. The last 20 years of Jane Byrne's life were conducted largely out of the public eye. In 2000, she told a reporter she was busy spending time with her grandson, Willie. She made a brief appearance during Rahm Emanuel's May 16, 2011, mayoral inauguration.
     This year, "the forgotten mayor" was championed by Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed, who spearheaded a drive to honor Byrne. In August 2014, the Circle Interchange was renamed the Jane Byrne Interchange, and the City Council voted to change the name of the park around the Water Tower to Mayor Jane M. Byrne Plaza.
     "Jane Byrne didn't just blaze a new trail for women in politics," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in July 2014. "She blazed a new trail forward to a better future for the entire city of Chicago."
     Services are pending.

Learning pacifism at the master's feet

   

Arun Gandhi at the Congress Plaza Hotel

     Someone from the Parliament of the World's Religions suggested I meet with Arun Gandhi, and I did Thursday because, really, how often do you have the chance to talk with someone who lived with Mohandas K. Gandhi? The one detail that I couldn't fit into the column is his saying that Gandhi himself never used the title "Mahatma" that is often associated with him. 

     "He didn't like that," Gandhi said, pointing out that Mahatma is Sanskrit for "saint"—"He would say, 'I'm not a saint; I'm a normal person.' But the people of India decided that one, and he couldn't live it down."

      

      Twelve is a tough age, and many a struggling preteen has been shipped off to relatives to help him adjust to this whirling ball of woe we call a world.

     In Arun’s case, two things made his relocation unusual. First, the relative he was sent to live with was in India, thousands of miles from his home in South Africa.

     And second, the relative was his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

     “We faced the brunt of prejudice and hate,” said Arun Gandhi, in Chicago to help plan the next Parliament of the World’s Religions, to be held in October 2015 in Utah. “Being a young man, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was very angry and wanted eye-for-eye justice. My parents decided it was time to go to India and give me an opportunity to live with my grandfather.”

     He lived with the world-famous pacifist for more than a year, until late 1947.

     “He taught me some lessons in that period, and in many ways laid the foundation for my life,” Gandhi said.

     What sort of lessons?

     “The first lesson he taught me was understanding anger, to channel it constructively. He didn’t deny anger, didn’t say anger was bad and suppress it. He said, ‘Anger is good.’ Anger is to the human being what oil is to the automobile. If we don’t put fuel into an automobile, it won’t run. If we don’t have anger, we won’t do anything. Anger is good, but what is bad is the way we abuse anger.”

     I had never heard it put that way.
     "We channel anger the way we channel electricity. Anger is just as deadly and destructive as electricity, but also could be just as good and useful if channeled constructively. We have never been taught about anger, so we get mad and do things that sometimes change the course of our lives."
     That makes anger very much like religion.
     "Religion has been misused and abused, to create hate and prejudice and killing in the name of God," said Gandhi. "We need to do something to bring religion back to love, respect, understanding and acceptance of each other, not hate and prejudice."
     Gandhi, 80, has devoted his life to fighting prejudice. He lives in Rochester, New York, but his Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute is based in Wauconda. Though his efforts are not without controversy. Gandhi was accused of prejudice himself in 2008, when he wrote that Jews and Israel were "the biggest players" in a culture of violence, which had critics recalling the pallid idiocy that his grandfather offered up to Germany's persecuted Jews in the 1930s, advising them to not flee, but to find joy in their oppression.
     "There is a misconception I'm anti-Jew," Gandhi said. "I'm not. I'm anti-violence."
     That's good enough for me. Though he promptly flipped the situation on its head.
     "I wasn't condemning the Jews or Israel," he continued. "The fact is, unless there is peaceful solution to the problem, we are going to get bogged down . . . if we see what is happening in the Middle East today, a lot of it is because of the Palestinian situation."
     Actually, the Palestinian situation is because of what has been happening in the Middle East, and anyone who believes otherwise, who dreams that should it by some miracle be settled, then the Middle East will become as placid as the Midwest, is still pointing fingers at Jews, though more slyly.
     Not to dwell on that. I like the idea that the Israel/Palestinian knot is so twisted that even a hereditary advocate of pacifism can find himself spouting disguised bigotries.
     I asked Gandhi about the importance of the Parliament, an institution that began in Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair.
     "We have to get people to start talking, to begin understanding each other and reaching out to each other," he said.
     Almost 125 years on, how's that coming?
     "The second step is to create a plan to take this a few steps forward to the next level," he said. "It's going to take a long time and going to take a lot of effort."
     Religion, to me, is not the solution to violence but an expression of the hostility people feel toward one another—conjuring a deity to put His divine thumbprint on your biases. Sure, you can pry religion away from that, just as you can use handguns as paperweights. But it's using an elaborate device to attempt something very simple.
     Before I let him go, I had to ask: You were an angry teen when you lived with Gandhi. Your grandfather was a famous pacifist. He obviously didn't spank you, right? How were you disciplined when you misbehaved?
     Gandhi laughed.
     "In our family, there was no punishment," he said. "Penance. We would fast for a day or two. We were never punished."

GTFO

     I can't imagine hating someone so much that I'd advertise it on the bumper of my car.
     Sadly, I didn't have to imagine it. All I had to do was walk by. There's a lot of that in contemporary American life: grotesqueries that grab you by the sleeve as you go about your business, or try to, and snarl out a low, wet, mean "Hi!"
     Thanks pal, thanks for sharing your cramped little world with me. Proud, are you? 
      The car was sitting in the parking lot of a moderately upscale restaurant in Northbrook where my wife and I went for lunch. So its owner isn't suffering so much he couldn't pop twenty bucks for lunch. I noticed the bumper sticker walking back to our car. Here, I'll blow it up for you. 
     If the acronym's meaning doesn't immediately leap out at you, don't feel bad. It eluded Edie too; I take that as a sign of purity of spirit. When you are immersed in this stuff, as I am, a certain sixth sense emerges.
      As a clue, notice the "O" contains the sunrise symbol used in Barack Obama's campaigns.
      Another hint. On the left bumper of the car, almost unnecessarily, is a yellow sticker, a version of the Revolutionary War "Don't Tread on Me" flag that Tea Partiers have embraced, representing their delusion that they are fighting for freedom, and not fighting against the freedoms of their fellow Americans and against their own country's success as a whole. Trying to hold back changes which are going to steamroll them, the way way the ignorant and the fearful and the prejudiced are always steamrolled by history, sooner or later.
      I've obscured the license plate, not because I worry someone would use it to track the car owner down and harass him—you just know it's a man—but, well, as as kindness. I don't anticipate the driver of the Durango will ever see this, but you never know, and I wouldn't want him to be made afraid. Or rather, more afraid. These people live on fear, clearly, and if real threats don't present themselves, they make them up. They need to justify their anger, to create villains, the way a slasher movie needs to establish the evil of its maniac before he can be subjected to the cruelties the audience is eager to enjoy.
     Fear and malice are the driving factors in their lives, and I don't want to add to it, because I'm a nice guy, and don't want to be like them. "When battling monsters," as my pal Nietschze said, "make sure that you do not in the process become a monster."
     Oh, GTFO stands for, "Get the Fuck Out." 
     Because Jan. 20, 2017, can't come around quick enough for these people. They have to cheer it along, to yearn for it, to celebrate and anticipate it. Because they have suffered ... um, oh let's come out and say it ... seeing a black man in the White House. That has to be reason because there's no possible explanation otherwise. Really, what has Barack Obama done to these folks that they would hate him so? What is the horror they're reacting to? Certainly not gun control. Or immigration reform. Just the contrary. Obama stepped up deportations, dramatically, trying to please those who would never be pleased (I assume; it certainly wasn't the right thing to do). The Affordable Care Act? It's affecting five percent of the country. Is that why there is a GTFO page online counting down the seconds? An entire line of GTFO products, bumper stickers and t-shirts and such? On a page offering t-shirts, I noticed this particular revealing design: "HOPE HE FAILS." 
    That's like the joke about the man drilling a hole under his seat in the row boat. I guess they don't realize that the president failing means the country failing, and them too. Which shows the difference between Obama scorn and Bush scorn, which Obama haters immediately bring up when attention is directed to their overarching hatred, as if Bush haters were suddenly their moral compass, as if the two were comparable, and they're not. This t-shirt illustrates why. People hated Bush because he was failing; people hate Obama so want him to fail. That might be a subtle difference to some, but to me seems clear and significant.
     For six years, the Republican right has hurt the country, and themselves with their insane rear guard action against anything Barack Obama has done. Our nation is frozen, largely. We can't do what we need to do, what the rest of the world has done long ago. In the next two years we'll no doubt see more of that, emboldened by their electoral win earlier this month. 
     Me, when it comes to Obama, I vacillate. Part of the time I want to fault him for not pushing harder, for not standing up more for his ideals more, whether by closing Guantanamo Bay, coming out earlier for gay marriage, trying harder for immigration reform, crafting a more comprehensive national health care laws.
    That view is based on his promises and his potential.
     But he is nothing if not a politician, and given the roadblocks he's run into, you can't fault him for not sprinting faster into the brick wall.
     When you hold his accomplishments up to the doorjamb-gnawing vehemence of his enemies, it's amazing he's done anything at all, from the Affordable Health Care Act, to this week's agreement with the Chinese to establish curbs on greenhouse emissions. Lack of participation of the Chinese always made international agreements trying to stem global warming somewhat pointless, as the Republicans liked to crow. Bringing them on board is hugely important in mitigating the disaster we can no longer avoid.
     Of course the Republicans, who don't recognize global warming as a real, man-made phenomenon, will find a reason to hoot him down on this too—they can't claim it doesn't go far enough, since they don't recognize the problem is within our control to begin with. Maybe they'll claim he's a traitor, for working out a secret deal with the Chinese. As with "amnesty," the actual situation doesn't really matter, they just need to find the right negative term they latch onto. Maybe they'll call it "accommodation." 
     And no, I did not key the car with the GTFO bumper sticker. Though the thought did cross my mind. When battling monsters....
       

I got plenty o' somethin'—opera tickets to give away!

With Adina Aaron, the latter half of Lyric's "Porgy and Bess"

     Every day, almost every newspaper in America runs a column devoted to lies intended to encourage the gullible to continue misunderstanding the world.  
     The Sun-Times used to run two.
     That it’s called “Daily Horoscopes” and that we’ve always run them must dilute the foolishness considerably, because in all the years I’ve worked here, readers have complained about the most head-scratchingly obscure elements of the paper, but nobody has ever demanded to know why we dabble in astrology, at least not to me. I don’t read them, though I often hold them up as a metaphor to those aghast at this or that feature found in the paper. “Here’s a flash,” I say. “It’s not for you. Not everything is for you.” The idea of there being other people, who appreciate other things, is one of the more thorny concepts to grasp, and running a horoscope helps drive that truth home.  A newspaper contains a universe, or should, and people discover in it what they may.
     Sure, the hoofbeats of change—or, if you prefer, doom—thunder louder day by day. The Internet is universe aplenty for most. But we’re still here, still twinkling in your morning sky as mightily as we can, and I like to think we’ll always fill a role, digging up news and curating the wordstorm online.
     Which is a long run-up to explaining why I’m extra pleased to announce the 7th annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest. Readers started asking about it last week, when I dropped in on a rehearsal of “Porgy and Bess,” which 100 readers will attend Dec. 8. The choice is ideal. Not only a truly great American opera, with soaring music and powerful voices. But it’s what got me into this whole opera business. I wrote a column about race and “Porgy,” an editor suggested this contest, and away we went.
     I didn’t give the details last week for the same reason I always drag my feet with this: we were still figuring them out. But now we have, and it’s bigger than ever. Not only are we giving away 50 pairs of great seats to the Lyric opera. There are also prizes—stays at a hotel, gifts. And a party beforehand, which we did one year and was a lot of fun. Find details at www.suntimes.com/todayspaper.

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