Do Republicans have grandparents too?

   

     This is my grandfather, Irwin Bramson. I don’t believe his picture has ever appeared in a newspaper before. He would be delighted to see it here.
     My grandfather was not famous, or successful, beyond supporting his family, working in a factory in Cleveland that made machine parts. He eventually owned his own house, on Rossmoor Road in Cleveland Heights. He was very proud of that.
    My grandfather was born on a farm in Bialystock Poland, in 1907 and was sent to this country because things were very bad there and he had a relative, a distant cousin in Cleveland who owned an automobile parts factory and would employ him. He left at 16 and never saw any of his family again; they were all murdered, man, woman and child by the Nazis and their henchmen.
     When he got here, he no doubt faced the scorn of those who felt that America was being corrupted by racially inferior immigrants such as himself that all manner of subhumans and Jews, were poisoning American blood, that they were constitutionally different and would never fit in.
    But he did fit in. He never went to college, but he met my grandmother, got married—they went to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago on their honeymoon in 1934. They had three daughters, my mother being the eldest. Had they been born in Poland, they all would have been murdered too. 
     All of my memories of him involve him sitting in a green Barcalounger, watching “The Price Is Right.” He smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon. He sucked Luden’s Cherry Cough drops for his throat—he would die of emphysema in 1981.
     He taught me chess. He would give me a dollar if I won and a dollar if I lost. He took me to my first baseball game. There was nothing mean or difficult about him. He did not complain. He asked nothing of anybody. In fact, he rarely spoke. He was a simple man, and I loved him.
     Everyone in the United States, unless they are a Native-American, has a person like my grandfather in their past, someone who came over here to escape hardship or horror and make a life. Whether it was 5 or 50 or 500 years ago, the story is the same. They came over and the country let them in.
     My grandfather became a citizen, not because he was a genius, not because he was harder working or smarter or better than any Mexican fording the Rio Grande. But because he could back then. There was an Ellis Island and a system that worked. Today Ellis Island is a shrine to ideals that half the country doesn’t believe anymore, who adopt the cruel role of the Americans who harassed their own forebears.
     I thought of my grandfather, after I watched Barack Obama’s brief speech Thursday night—lucky I have cable because none of the networks, the supposed mainstream media supposedly in his thrall, bothered to show it. He announced his changes to immigration policy, to allow undocumented immigrants who have been here longer than five years to “get right with the law,” register and not fear deportation. 
     Before Obama even spoke, the Republicans, who oppose everything the president has done, is doing, or will do, made a show of opposing this too, a rare trifecta blending economic myopia, longterm political suicide, and lack of basic human decency. Only time will tell if they respond by trying to impeach him, shut down the government or some new strategem. The only thing that they are certain not to do is pass the comprehensive immigration reform which, announcing his stopgap, Obama called for.
    That this is the right thing, that it is long overdue, that it will help the United States economy, that to do otherwise is cold hypocrisy and a denial of their own family, an insult the memory of my grandfather and theirs and the millions like him, never wrinkles their brow.
     My wife and I watched the speech.
     “He looks tired, frustrated,” my wife said.
     “He’s trying to talk sense to idiots,” I said.
     I’m glad I saw the speech, because I was starting to think very little of Obama, just by osmosis, just by living in a country where he is so despised. I wish he had done this three months, six months, a year ago. Not doing so was the kind of small, mean political calculation that has hobbled his presidency. The Democrats got drubbed anyway.
     But now I realize, the bottom line with Obama is: he did what he could do. He didn’t waste effort trying the impossible. Even his narrowed options were tough to manage.
     The good news is, he’s already won.
     As with gay marriage, the notion of no longer keeping millions who came to this country illegally in rightless limbo forever will seem an impossibility until suddenly it doesn’t and everybody wonders what took us so long to do the moral thing. Then the people who are castigating the president now will be hard to find. Cornered, they will shrug off their fanatical opposition to people just like their own grandparents with some easy rationalization. What really struck me about the president’s speech is he could speak the words at all, that he somehow found the stamina to present a cogent argument to rabid enemies who stopped listening long ago. There is a nobility to that.

Don't bike drunk

     A video made the rounds last year showing a woman riding a Divvy bike on Lake Shore Drive. 
     We stood around the newsroom and shook our heads—how stupid, exactly, can a person be? Taking a bike on the busy highway? Having ridden Divvy bikes all over downtown, from Roosevelt Road to Logan Square, I tried to answer that: 
      I can see how something like that happens, I said. You go off course. Once I was heading to the Aqua Tower, which I'd normally cab or walk but, since I was on a bike, I pedaled east on Kinzie, which made sense, then took a right at Michigan, which made sense, but ended up on Lower Michigan, waiting in the intersection to take a left onto Lower Wacker Drive, which suddenly didn't make sense at all: a busy, dark, dangerous intersection where nobody expects to see a bike.
     This is a bad idea, I thought, riding like mad to get out of there.
     A similar thought might have snapped through the booze-soaked brain of the 24-year-old mope who took a Divvy on Lake Shore Drive about 2:45 a.m. Saturday, weaving across lanes, eventually getting involved in a serious crash that severed his foot and left him in "very critical" condition.
    According to news reports, the cyclist was riding at 3100 N. Lake Shore Drive, when he swerved into a 2008 Mitsubishi, being driven by an Uber cab driver, and got clipped by the side mirror. He fell. When that car stopped to help him, another car hit them.       
     There's nothing really to be said that isn't obvious: don't bike drunk. While not quite as dangerous as driving drunk, at least to other people, your reflexes and judgment are still impaired and you risk doing something stupid, such as biking Lake Shore Drive at night—extra stupid because there's a bike path right there, nearby, along the lakeshore. 
     No one has gotten seriously injured on a Divvy bike before, and as someone who enjoys riding them, it's a shame to see that unblemished record broken in such a tragic way by a reckless individual. I'd like to say this doesn't count. But I suppose it does. I don't see how you can blame Divvy, though he'll probably end up suing the bike share service, if he lives, for allowing him access to a bike when he was impaired. You wish a person who does that would be able to say, "This was my fault" but that takes rare honesty. As it is, he'll probably be missing a foot, as a reminder of his folly. 
     And this tragedy should remind those who drink, particularly with the holiday season upon us, to plan ahead of how they're getting home, so they don't go home in an ambulance. And a reminder to those of us who don't drink that, though we might miss out on a bit of the fun, there's a whole boatload of misery that we also avoid, and that's a pretty good deal. As Upton Sinclair wrote: "Not drinking is no easy passport to happiness, no automatic assurance of a good and happy and creative life. What it does do is to increase the odds enormously."

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Paperback books were vaguely disreputable when they came out, 100 years ago. Cheap editions for the underclasses, almost an insult to the concept of books.
     But that bias was short-lived, and while some people do enjoy the tactile pleasure and sturdiness of a hardback book over its more flimsy covered cousin, the differences are not given much thought, and rightly so. 
     Thus while reading electronically is seen as somehow suspect, a diminishment of the heft and permanence of a book, I think it is a passing qualm, and whether you read Moby-Dick online or in a physical book will not be particularly important, except the former experience will save you considerable arm strain. 
      I noticed this young man, consulting his laptop, surrounded by books. In a library, yes, but which library? I will give you a hint: it is not a public library. 
      The winner will receive a bag of marvelous Bridgeport coffee, which I have been drinking by the steaming cupful and enjoying greatly. Make sure to post your guesses below. Good luck.

Today is Nov. 22. If you missed last year's 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination story, about how Chicago helped break the shocking news to the world, you can read it by clicking here.

Bank phone poll spills the beans on tellers' doom

    

     With the election over, thank merciful God, I thought pesky telephone polls would subside. But if anything, they’ve increased. Not the “Who has your vote?” polls, or what I call “Slur Polls” — questions designed not to collect answers but to deliver attacks; polls that start out normally and then slide into insinuation: “On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most disgusted, and 1 being not as disgusted as you ought to be, how revolted were you to learn of the secret slush fund of Rep. Peckinsniff ...”)
     I try not to give much time to phone solicitors. I’ve learned to quickly set the receiver back down if the person on the other end doesn’t immediately reply to my tentative “Hello?” because that means it’s some automatic demon dialer in Mumbai that calls 10 numbers at a time and then connects with the first to answer. That takes 1.5 seconds, and by then I’ve hung up.

      But with phone surveys, I play along in a kind of information judo, using callers’ momentum against them. While they try to pry information out of me, I learn from them.

      For instance. Bank of America called this week. I am a preferred customer, which means I leave too much money sitting in accounts, drawing 0.03 percent interest, money that Bank of America then loans out at 3 percent. (That’s not “3 percent interest” they give , by the by. That’s three-hundredths of a percent. You wonder why anyone bothers at that point; the interest they pay hardly seems worth the paperwork to tally it).
     So, the Bank of America phone pollster wants to know: Have I used their Northbrook branch bank in the past 30 days? Why yes, I have! Just the other day. Working at home, at lunchtime, I took a break to do "errands"— my excuse to stand up and step outside. I stroll to the library and the post office, the hardware store, the grocery store and the bank. While most suburbanites don't visit their neighbors without getting in a car, I like that we live cheek-by-jowl to downtown, or to what passes for a downtown in Northbrook, and can walk everywhere. Doing so makes me feel like a character in a Richard Scarry story, if you remember those brightly colored children's books where friendly animal characters are always going about quotidian tasks, bakers baking and police officers directing traffic and such. My self-image during these strolls is not precisely a bear in a fedora waving his paw at a pig in a white apron. But very close. (I won't speculate on how I'm actually perceived, the likelihood of Northbrook mothers cautioning their naughty children with, "Now you behave, or I'll turn you over to the Scary Wandering Man and he'll put you in a pie and eat you for his dinner.")
     The greeter at the bank, the phone poll asked. Did I find her helpful? Uh-oh, I thought, somebody's job is in the crosshairs.
     I went to bat for the bank greeter. Yes indeed, I said, I find them enormously helpful. Which is true; it's helpful, after a morning staring at a computer screen by yourself, to actually have a human being smile and say hello and point you toward the tellers.
     And then an even more ominous question: Was I willing to wait "any amount of time" to use the services of my bank?
     "Any amount of time?" I replied, in a small voice. As in hours? No, I suppose not ...
     The next morning, in one of those coincidences that makes you wonder if the whole world is not one vast clockwork conspiracy, the Wall Street Journal published a story about the endangered bank teller. That banks, in their constant drive to hoover up more of your money while providing less in return, are using fewer tellers and paying them less. ATMs are vastly more economical than employees who, though they can greet customers, also draw salaries and take sick days and have babies. They want what employees they do have to be busy issuing second mortgages to people who need money because they haven't had a raise in nine years, and not indulging eccentric coots who just want to keep their blood circulating.
     Cash is going away someday, just as department stores, mail carriers and, yes, newspaper columnists and bank tellers, eventually. There's no point keening over it. Society does fine without gas station attendants or telegraph operators.
     But what about the people who are the cashiers and baggers and bank tellers? Where will their equivalent be in the new economy? Baristas and warehouse workers, I suppose. You know, Bank of America used to be LaSalle Bank, and LaSalle Bank had a full-time staff curator to keep track of its photo collection. In the end, when they sold it off, they made a fortune on the rare prints. There are many ways to make money, and firing people isn't the only path to success.

Replogle sold the globe to the world

    

     Memory fades. It's ironic that such a grim truth should be revealed, not just in one but in two ways, in Monday's frothy post about the carnival surrounding Kim Kardashian's Brobdingnagian butt. 
     But I suppose it's also apt. New wonders push into the space where old stuff used to be. 
     First, I used the word "steatopygic," (and I'm going to dial back on the big words. Enough already, with the big words, as my mother would say*) and cited Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" for teaching it to me. Though the word isn't there. An alert reader cited a passage containing "callpygian" which means about the same thing (actually "well-shaped" as opposed to "fat"). Several readers mentioned "callipygian," which is a little scary. That must have been the source of my error, though how one morphed into the other I cannot imagine. I would have sworn...

     The second reminder of the corrosive effect of time on memory was my use of "Replogle desk globe." I was not trying to be obscure (I'm never trying to be obscure; it just happens).  To me, it was a just a bit of local color, like saying "Radio Flyer sled" or "Jays potato chips." But several readers wrote in to say, "huh?"
    Replogle was a Chicago institution for 80 years, from 1930, when its factory opened in Broadview, to when the company laid off 84 workers at the end of 2010 and sold the brand name to an Indianapolis maker of school globes. Though the world's largest globe maker in a town once known for maps—Rand-McNally (a map publisher, I don't want to mystify people again) got its start here in 1856—somehow, Replogle never quite entered Chicago's consciousness.   

     Though not for lack of me trying to put it there. I've had an old Replogle globe on my desk for more than 30 years, and was keen to see where those lion's paws feet were carved. Here's my visit to their factory, ulp, almost 17 years ago.

     Take the geopolitical complexity of maps. Add woodworking. Season with metalcraft. Blend in the little-called-upon art of making spheres from flat surfaces, and you have a recipe for the odd mix of skills used making globes.

     In the case of Replogle Globes, a million globes a year, from 4.7 inch desktop models to the office-eating 32-inch diameter Diplomat globes, cradled in their hand-rubbed mahogany frames.
     Few nations on Earth are without a Replogle globe -- they sit in schoolrooms from Chile to China (the place names in Spanish in the former, of course, and Chinese in the latter -- the company also makes globes in French and German). There has been a Replogle globe in the Oval Office of the White House ever since Hoover. Replogle make globes not only of the Earth, but of Mars, Venus and the moon -- a big seller in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not so popular now.     
     The company was started in 1930 by Luther Replogle (pronounced Rep-logel), a Chicago school supplies salesmen who began making globes in his basement.
     The latest incarnation of that operation occupies 250,000 square feet on 25th Avenue in Broadview. Perhaps the best way to envision the factory is to think of it as three factories: globe production, metalworking and a woodshop.
     The smaller globes are stamped from cardboard. Sheets of cardboard are cut into a 12-pedaled daisy shape, as are the paper maps that go over them.
     The two flat pieces are molded together on enormous industrial flywheel presses, turning them into hemispheres. The eight-foot-tall presses with their tons of force seems enormous for the little 9-inch half spheres produced.
     Globes that light up are made from plastic -- vacuformed in molds. The larger light-up globes are pasted over hollow polypropylene spheres.
    For the largest globe, orange-peel-shaped map segments -- called "gores" -- are laid by hand on the spheres, carefully smoothed and stretched into place using special paste so there are no flaws or gaps. Customers paying up to $6,500 — the cost of the top model — can't be expected to put up with a lot of bubbles.
     Laying the map over the large globe can take eight hours; and if the last gore somehow doesn't line up -- "I sit down and cry then pull them all up and start over," an employee says.
     The hemispheres are trimmed, one at a time, and then "polar washers" are inserted — metal rings intended to let the globes spin for years without their cardboard giving away. Then a cardboard ring is glued into one hemisphere around the equator and the other hemisphere tamped onto it with a machine that gives the upper half a firm tap.
      Finally, a tape is applied to mark the equator and — conveniently — hide the seam dividing the halves. The globes are sprayed with a UV protectant, so they don't fade.
     Tumbling the globes on a conveyer belt would damage them, so they move around the plant suspended from hooks on an overhead chain system. At times the factory seems like a giant clockwork cosmos, with worlds of green and blue and black and sepia all moving at various speeds and directions and levels.
     In the metalworking area, coils of steel are turned into circular bases, stamped, then decorated. The rings some globes sit in are "butt welded," the ends of the loop welded together then buffed so there is no seam.
     Finally there's the woodshop, a large room filled with lathes and saws and stacks of lumber, waiting to be turned into legs and wood bases.    
     Despite the care put into buffing metal and finishing wood, the trickiest part of any globe is definitely the map. Replogle is one of the few companies around whose products can be made obsolete by events thousands of miles away.
     The world is always changing. Arctic regions shift. Islands are cut in half by storms. Then there are the political upheavals, which have been kicked into overdrive this past decade.
     Keeping track of the shift and flux of world borders is the job of LeRoy Tolman, chief cartographer, in his office one flight above the factory floor.
     Sometimes he hits changes on the nose. The day West and East Germany re-united, a globe showing the unified German state was rolling off the lines.
     Replogle sells 40 different types of globes; the largest, the Diplomat, has over 20,000 names on it. Updating takes time.
     "We were kept busy for a year after the Soviet Union broke up," Tolman says.
     Part of Tolman's job is determining the accepted outline of a nation. He spreads a big map of Egypt out over his desk, responding to an irate Egyptian government complaint that its southern boundary with Sudan is shown as it actually is, and not how it exists in the fervent hopes of the Egyptians.
     Not much of a market in Egypt, so Tolman, after checking with the U.S. State Department, keeps the border where it is in actuality. That isn't always the outcome. The company wants to sell globes and doesn't flinch at following a customer's interpretation of what the world looks like.
     Globes going to Arab countries retained "Palestine" years after Israel was founded. Japanese globes show the country as still possessing the Kirin Islands, which the Soviets stripped away in 1945.
     So if Saddam Hussein placed a big enough order, he could get globes showing the United States as a possession of Iraq?
     "All but Illinois," said Tolman. "Economics is the prime factor."
          —originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 2, 1998

* Did you notice the irony of my swearing off big words almost immediately after deploying the Swiftian term, "Brobdingnagian"? I didn't, not until the third time I read this. Brobdingnag was, you might recall, the land of the giants in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," and "Brobdingnagian" is a fancy term for "very big." I left it in because, well, perhaps you're as amused by my inconsistencies and oversights as I have learned to be. God knows I can't correct them at this point.

Birds, squirrels and the trouble in Israel

      Today's column has an unusual backstory. My former colleague at the Sun-Times, Rich Cahan, once a photo editor, now a busy publisher of books of historic photography, emailed me Monday to say that Wednesday his show of portraits taken in the West Bank opens in River North. 
     Suppressing my immediate reaction—"kinda short notice, huh?"—I told him sure, I'd be happy to meet him as he set up the exhibit at The Art Works Projects studio, an attractive little gallery tucked in the shadow of the expressway at 625 N. Kingsbury.
      Rich spent a week in the occupied territories last year, and took the portraits in the show on his final night, basically by knocking on doors and asking whoever answered if he could take their picture. 

Rich Cahan 

     In one sense, they are unexceptional photos of ordinary people. Though in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, ordinary people, who are neither soldiers nor protestors, leaders nor spokespeople, perpetrators nor victims, are exactly the individuals who are least noticed or heard. 
     Rich was obviously moved by what he had found during his stay, and focused on one aspect: raids by the Israeli military at night, because, he said, "it was as much as I could physically comprehend, night raids."
     We talked about the dilemma of being an American Jew, wanting to support Israel, but being uncertain where, if anywhere, the current Israeli policy is going. I told him that I try to begin slowly when attempting to converse with my unwaveringly what-Israel-does-is-by-definition-right friends, starting with something like, "The Palestinians, they're people too, right?" but even that tack usually doesn't get me far.
     Passions are high on this here as well as there. Rich went on the trip with 10 others, including Brant Rosen, the controversial Evanston rabbi who had to leave his congregation this year due to conflict over his impassioned support of the Palestinian cause. Myself, I find blindly boosting the Palestinians is as unsupportable as reflexively backing the Israelis. There's plenty of blame to go around.

       "We travelled all over," Rich said, "but spent most of our time in Bil'in"—a small town of about 1,800 people that gained notoriety because of its residents' resistance to Israel's security wall.
      "Because I took it in this town, there are people who say that gives it a particular political statement," he said. "But it could have been any town in the West Bank."
      I asked him if he was worried people will view him as a tool.
     "I don't know who I'm a tool of," he said. I also wondered whether, being Jewish, he had been scared spending a week in the West Bank. He said he certainly felt threatened, but not by Palestinians.
     "We did fear the IDF," he said, using the initials of the Israeli Army. "Our group was tear-gassed three times."
      Cahan's show "Night Raid in Bil'in" opens Wednesday, Nov. 19—there is a reception from 6:25 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the gallery at 625 N. Kingbury. It runs for a month, though the gallery keeps irregular hours, so you need an appointment to get in, though there are several scheduled events you can learn about on their web site. It is part of a program called "Occupied Territories/Contested Lands; Part 1," which strives for an encouraging, and rare, balance: another installation focuses on the difficulties Israelis face—there are photos of families gathered outside their rocket shelters, for instance. 
     I've never had anyone adequately explain to me why supporting Israel demands that I deny the humanity of the Palestinians, or how recognizing their tragic situation somehow is a betrayal of my own heritage. In my view, being Jewish, if it is to mean anything beyond blind team loyalty, demands it. 
     The column below was written Tuesday morning, while waiting to go to the gallery. I wrote it as a placer column—in case I got hit by a bus on the walk over, and assuming I'd scrap it after I talked to Rich and plug what I learned there into it. 
     But I decided to keep it as is.

     Let’s see if we can solve the Israeli/Palestinian problem right now, shall we?

     The Palestinians want Israel, their former home, to be their home again. While waiting, they dwell in misery in the occupied territories, passing the time by lobbing rockets and committing various atrocities, like Tuesday’s slaughter of four Jews in a Jerusalem synagogue. They call it self-defense.

     The Israelis, meanwhile, aren’t about to give up their land to the Palestinians and are content to keep them under guard — not without reason, given the facts outlined above—responding to their attacks with devastating force. Meanwhile, the years click by and the Israelis, not realizing it, grow nearly as divided, angry and extreme as their enemies, as David Remnick grimly describes in a recent New Yorker.

     Have I plainly stated the situation? Good. Now, on to the solution.

     The Palestinians could have their state, but not the state they want. And the Israelis could allow the Palestinians back into their country, but then it wouldn’t be a Jewish country. Plus there’s no reason to think Palestinians would give up the killing that has been their central mode of self-expression.

     The solution, therefore, clearly is ... umm.

     This direct approach isn’t working.

     Let’s try a metaphor. Maybe that’ll help.

     I love birds, and for the usual reasons. They fly. They sing. They’re beautiful.

     I hit upon the strategy of attracting birds by feeding them, and I stuck a wrought-iron pole in the backyard, hung a feeder off it, kept it stocked with seed. It worked. Blue jays and red-winged blackbirds, yellow swallows and brown robins flock to it, to my joy.

     And squirrels.
     The squirrels ruin everything. I hate squirrels. They dart. They twitch. They have, in the past, attacked my home, in the city, trying to chew through the accordion slide next to a window air conditioner, my wife shrieking while I mobilized to our defense.
    Squirrels have the run of my backyard. They are interlopers and don't belong. I'm willing to cede the trees to them; what choice is there? But I've tried to keep them off the feeder. That's the birds' food they're gobbling up. At first greasing the iron pole worked - not so much making them slide, as they're loath to get coated in the stuff.
     But the grease weathers away and is overcome by the squirrel onslaught. Before I know it the iron pole is thick with fur, and the squirrels are gobbling the seed again. They chewed apart my previous feeder, so I bought a sturdier, caged model. I've tried a wide, anti-squirrel baffle, but they just leap upon that and use it as a base. I suppose a 10-foot pole with a baffle might work, but then filling the feeder would be a chore, which it already is, with squirrels that can easily eat three pounds of birdseed a day.
     At the back door, watching twitchy squirrels knock seed down to their grinning confederates, I've had dark thoughts, considered installing spikes or razors. I could buy a .22, shoot a few, nail their limp bodies around the feeder as a caution to others. I know of guys on my block who do that. It might not work, but it would make me feel better. Although it is against the law - the shooting guns in Northbrook part.
     And I measured the impulse to shoot the squirrels and nail up their bloody carcasses against the philosophy I was supposedly acting under—my love of birds—and found it lacking. Killing squirrels would be unworthy of bird love, would diminish it. Remembering what started all this, I had an epiphany.
     The squirrels actually belong in the yard. They've always been there. My not liking them doesn't change that and says much more about me than it does about them.
     Maybe I could learn to like squirrels. Say this for them: The squirrels don't eat the birds; rather they all peck away at the seed fallen to the ground, oblivious to each other.
     It might be easier, I realized, instead of constructing lethal feeders or attacking the squirrels, to simply accept that they are here to stay and try to find value in them. True, doing so will incur more expense (a lot more seed). But so would buying a .22.
     To circle back on the subject at hand. I hope the metaphor doesn't elude you ("Steinberg says Palestinians are squirrels! Calls Jews birds!"). The only solution is a shift in mindset, on both sides. If the Jewish aspect of Israel is merely another brutal faith oppressing those who don't fit, what's the point? If Palestinians really want to go back to Israel, what's their plan for accepting the Jews who have always been there?
     This is a realm where humans fall far short of squirrels which, despite all their shortcomings, coexist with birds just fine.

Welcome to Chicago, Archbishop. Keep an eye on the soup...

     Welcome, Archbishop Cupich, to Chicago, a city whose Catholicism is entwined with its entire history. As you may know, we were discovered in 1673 by a priest, Jacques Marquette S.J., and the first non-native religious services here were the daily masses he held for the Kaskaskia Indians. When Chicago incorporated in 1833, there were 130 Catholic inhabitants, and a log cabin Roman Catholic church, St. Mary’s, at Wacker and Lake.
     No sooner was the first Catholic church built, however, than the minister of the first Protestant church, Jeremiah Porter, knelt outside and prayed for its downfall. A reminder that, as Catholic a town as this is, there has always been hostility. An anarchist put arsenic in Cardinal George Mundelein’s soup at the banquet welcoming him in 1915. A hundred of the faithful were poisoned, one died, though Mundelein survived, an important quality in a cardinal. “It takes more than soup to get me,” he quipped; 250 churches were built in the archdiocese during his quarter century as cardinal.
     These are different days. Churches are closing instead of being built. Though it’s still a good idea to keep a close eye on the soup (metaphorically; our anarchists are much better behaved nowadays).
     Chicago has had eight archbishops and 55 mayors, which should give you an idea of their relative importance. Archbishop Cupich (pronounced "Soo-pich") won't officially become cardinal for a few years yet.
     Mundelein’s successor, Cardinal Samuel Stritch was a “Southern gentleman” who nevertheless helped integrate the church. He was replaced in 1958 by scripture scholar Albert Meyer—that always struck me as a rather Jewish name for a cardinal. He also tried to improve race relations. “Christian faith knows not the distinction of race, color or nationhood,’ he said.
     So expanding the boundaries of who is welcome on Sunday is nothing new.
     His replacement was Cardinal John Cody, who served from 1965-82. Some of your flock still resent the Sun-Times for its 1981 expose on his diversion of church funds to a female friend. About a million dollars. He was called "a truly evil man" and a "perfect monster," but not by us; that's a quote from the editor of the Chicago Catholic. One historian said that Chicagoans were "more relieved than saddened" at Cody's passing.
     The exact opposite was true of his successor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the gold standard when it comes to your job.
     "I am Joseph, your brother," Bernardin said when he greeted the media in 1982. He was beloved for his gentleness, for the grace with which he faced the accusation of abuse directed at him, a charge later recanted, and his courage in the face of illness. Journalists covering his funeral openly wept. A Sun-Times photographer, John White, was one of his pallbearers.
     Then to Cardinal George. This is not the day for frank assessments of his tenure. Let's just say he didn't set an impossible standard for you to surpass. I happened to be among the media scrum standing at the foot of the driveway to the mansion on George's first day, when he came barreling out of the driveway in his black SUV, and I remember the cameramen and reporters tripping over each other as we all leapt out of the way so as to not be run over by God's chosen vessel in Chicago. It was an unpleasant moment that augured more to come.
     In general, the rule is: be nice to the media and the media will be nice to you. The press is not actually an arm of the church, though it can seem that way. With 40 percent of the population of Chicago and vicinity Catholic — about the same as it was in 1833, oddly enough — 40 percent of the audience is thus Catholic, so the media do not go out of their way to antagonize the faithful, though they are no longer dutiful lambs. So expect us to side with them, not you, when your interests conflict. Still, we're more a hallelujah chorus, as you're seeing.
     The media also tend to be liberal, thus are cheered by Pope Francis' fresh approach: that the church needn't harp on sexual matters that the modern world long ago delegated from God to individuals. You seem in sync with the pope, but remember: that also means expectations are high. There will no doubt be low points to come; like priests, the press has our calling and must follow where the news leads. Hint: Don't put your step-cousins up at Lake Point Tower.
     I would hope you'll tuck away your rapturous greeting from the press, along with Cardinal George's polite farewell, as a reminder that, for all our periodic muckraking, the media is a champion of the status quo. We're the mirror and will reflect what you do, good or ill. I hope it's mostly good. God knows Chicago could use the help.