"Better racist police than ignorant thugs"

    In Hamlet, the melancholy Dane asks Rosencrantz if he has heard any news. 
     "None, my lord," the courtier replies, "but the world's grown honest."
     "Then is doomsday near," Hamlet quips — the idea being the if people start saying what they think, candidly without draping it in artifice and deceit, that would be such a radical departure from the usual it would mean that the world must be coming to an end.     
     I thought of that line Monday, looking over my dozens of emails responding to my column dipping a toe into the racial tempest over police roiling over the country in the wake of the Ferguson and chokehold cases. I expected a lot of poison, but was impressed by the thoughtfulness, the intelligence of the replies. As of 4 p.m. I hadn't received a single foaming hater, which is odd, even on days when I don't stick a trembling hand between the bars of the police department. 
      Two stuck out —one from a white reader, one from a black. As they are lengthy, I'll keep this intro to a minimum. I found them interesting, and thought you might find them interesting too.

Dear Neil:

     We may be a nation of laws, but we're also a nation of habits, some of them very old and very destructive.
     A few weeks ago I was driving around the Northwest Side with an old friend from my teenaged years, a retired Chicago cop.  I dared to broach the subject of local politics and he ran down a list of current politicians who were gang members back in the day.  I remarked on how much I enjoyed all my Mexican neighbors who moved to my block and all he could relate to was all the gang and drug activity related to his policing of Hispanic neighborhoods.
     Not for a moment did I think this was blind racism.  After all, he had been married to a Hispanic woman and was never one to throw around racial epithets.  But the years of having different experiences and forming different habits determined how we viewed the same city.  Eventually he had moved out to a farm in Wisconsin to save his nerves and sanity.
     Neil, you have a legitimate point about our not losing the cop's point of view amid the reaction to the Grand Jury's ruling on the death of Eric Garner.  But it is disingenuous for the Second City Cop to say that police officers are merely carrying out the duty to enforce laws that others have passed.  
     It would have been more accurate for him to say that police officers are enforcing the order that we expect them to protect, because it is a physical impossibility for the police to deal with every infraction of the law that takes place.  It always comes down to responding to situations that pose the greatest perceived threat to the public order and to reacting on the spot and by practicing the learned behaviors that are appropriate to the moment and that will be supported by officials after the fact.
     Whether the police like it or not, these behaviors often reflect a much larger context.  They reflect a justice system that has incarcerated way too many blacks, as you pointed out in your column.  They reflect a law enforcement system that has, at least in Chicago, failed to protect poor black neighborhoods from horrendous acts of gun violence.
     The most interesting question, at least to me, is whether the action of the police in the Garner case also reflects the persistence of Jim Crow.  We whites tend to forget how recent Jim Crow laws were on the books, even in the North up to the late 1960s in such forms as protective covenants on real estate.  We also tend to forget that it may take many generations to wean ourselves from the attitudes and habits that provided a basis for the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the deliberate segregation of our city.
     The outrage over Eric Garner is more than "Racial Catharsis No. 342."  What we lost through the Grand Jury decisions in the Eric Garner and the Ferguson cases was the present opportunity to bring to light any of the underlying factors that may have led to the deaths of two unarmed black men at the hands of white policemen. We badly need these opportunities.  That is because the current outrage also expresses a hidden shame in our body politic that it is 2014 and we are still fighting the Civil War.
     The wisest response I have heard to the two recent incidents came from two African American journalists, one old and one young.  They both said that they were surprised, but not shocked, by the Grand Jury verdicts.  They also said that the fight for equality is a long, long struggle and this is just another milepost.  Many miles to go.
     As for my old cop friend and me, we just shook our heads and wondered how we had such different perceptions of the city in which we both had grown up.  We went on to the next topic of conversation, as if to say, not in our generation.
                                                                   –Tom Golz

And then there was this:

     I am a Black man. I agree with you article 100%. And I believe that other Black folk will suffer the most from this latest round of highly emotional, explosively-charged mass hysteria. I see a complete ignoring of facts. I wonder, when the police powers/functions are good and nullified, who will protect me from my fellow anarchist Black brother? You see,    Blacks victimize Blacks more than any other race.
     Forget that we are extra cautious and vigilant when we walk in our own communities, often afraid when someone walks to close.
     I watched that Ferguson stuff. Now this giant of a guy strong armed a store owner. He took what he wanted. He showed no stealth when he left the store, he walked out in the open. Now, I was always taught to weigh out all the potential consequences of your behavior and choose what you could live with. I would've never challenged a cop with a gun after I robbed a store, nor would I have walked down the middle of the street once I robbed the store. I would've made my escape in the shadows. The audacity.
     Adrenaline high, I just strong armed a store and took what I want, I could take on a cop with a gun. WRONG!
     My mother said, "Boy. Some lessons cost you. And some a lot."
     I'd prefer racist police than to let some ignorant thugs who would love to run things, be in charge.
     A fine time for White American to rally for a cause. It would cause a state of anomie in my neighborhood if they are successful. It doesn't make our neighbor any less the example of what's wrong.
                                                                         —Sherman Johnson 

What about the cops' side of the story?

     

     So when does somebody speak up for the police? 

 Believe me, I have no interest in being that person. It’s a lose-lose proposition. 

 The public—in one long howl of outrage, based on two fatal encounters between young black men and police officers, in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City—won’t appreciate having the perspective of the bad guys of the moment defended, even a little. 

 The cops — a closed-rank echo chamber if ever there were—sure don’t want the support of the media, whom they universally despise, and particularly not from me. 

 And, to complete the circle—making it, then, a lose-lose-lose situation —  I don’t want to do it. Not to say the issue is unimportant — it is important, particularly if you are one of the African-Americans killed by excessive police force. But if I were to start listing the huge, festering issues facing black America: lack of capital, lack of jobs, bad schools, bad health care — it would be a while before we even got to the legal system skewed against them, incarcerating black men unfairly en masse, and we’d have to list a few more pressing judicial wrongs before we even got around to cops killing folk.

 But hey, I understand, public attention is not parceled out coolly by the Jedi Council based on objective analysis of our most pressing problems. Debate flashes and strobes, echoing off rare emotional episodes, and one video is worth a thousand studies.

 Back to the cops.
  When I set out to write today's column, I figured it was high time I joined in the clamor. You can only blather on so long about obits and Santa letters while the nation is going through Racial Catharsis No. 342 without feeling a little superfluous.
     Not that I was eager to swan dive into Ferguson, with my white-guy naivete. Pundit comments on the situation have tended toward the painfully obvious (one New York Times star began a column "We Americans are a nation divided," and ended, "There are no easy solutions. But let's talk.") Well, duh.
     But I thought I had an interesting twist. I'd begin the column, "You don't need me to tell you that cops are angry and racist; they'll tell you so themselves," then hopped onto that mighty online river of anonymous police anger and bile, Second City Cop. I figured I would pluck out a few of the more bitter blasts of thin blue line contempt, vastly familiar to anyone who has ever visited the site, probably the most public face of the Chicago Police Department, given the reactive, we'll-be-under-this-rock-if-you-can-find-us stance that the administration takes.
     I started reading Friday' post, headlined, "Protests Over What Exactly?"

     "Then there's the fact of the deceased weighing 350 pounds, his extensive heart disease, his asthma, the fact that he was able to yell not once, not twice, but TEN times that he couldn't breathe - if you can yell, you can breathe, you're just wasting the breath fighting. Oh, and he didn't die of 'choking,' he died of a heart attack an hour later. But those facts don't get reported on in the mainstream media."

  Hmm. I paused. SSC is correct, sort of. The cops sitting on Eric Garner's chest didn't help, but it isn't as if he was strangled.
     He quotes a reader:
     ". . . we actually pay them [the police] to use force when a law-breaking suspect (even one breaking a trivial law) resists arrest. That is the job we've given them."
     That also makes sense.
    "To say this guy is guilty of murder or manslaughter seems to me to be a case of scapegoating the people we've tasked with implementing a policy that we have imposed ourselves . . . If trivial laws should not provide grounds for arrest, We should change the laws to say so."
     To which Second City Cop says: "The bottom line—if you don't want cops enforcing the law, then stop passing laws and telling the police to enforce them. When arrested, you don't get to resist arrest. Period. The law says so. You resist, there are rules in place to overcome your resistance. You are not a 'jury of one' deciding what laws apply to you. Cops are authorized by the duly elected authority to overcome resistance."
     You can debate whether that is true, but it struck me as an opinion worth airing. We are a nation of laws, and we call on police to enforce those laws. They don't always do it in a pretty fashion, but to judge all police by these public incidents is to make the same mistake as those cops who treat every black person as a thug who hasn't yet reached for his weapon. So to echo my betters at The New York Times, yes, we need a dialogue about all this. But you can't have a conversation if only one side is doing all the talking.

God of the car keys

 

Rev. Otis Moss

                                        And almost every one, when age,

                                          Disease, or sorrows strike him,

                                        Inclines to think there is a God,

                                          Or something very like Him.

                                                                                      —Arthur Clough

   "So what's your connection to all this?" I said, my standard opening line at weddings of strangers and luncheons such as the one I found myself at last week. I was standing awkwardly at a large round table, waiting for the program to begin and people to sit down.
     "Well, I'm a man of faith, and I care about the environment," he said, explaining that he's highly placed at  the Department of Natural Resources. "And you?"
      "Well," I said, not really thinking. "I'm not a man of faith, and I've never cared much about the environment. But Rev. Sauder asked me to come." 
     Rev. Brian Sauder, a Mennonite minister, and executive director of something called Faith in Place. (Slogan: "Stronger Congregations for a Sustainable World.") He had invited me to their "annual celebration and fundraiser" and not having anything better to do, I shrugged and went.
     The Chicago-based group, as best I could glean by the speeches, attempts a heretofore unimagined union of religious faith and environmentalism. Usually those two forces are at odds. Christianity's basic take on the Earth and its riches is that God gave the whole ball of wax to mankind to ruin however we please and it's all going to come to a fiery end any moment anyway, which is a good thing, because then the blessed goes to heaven, where nobody worries about recycling. Judaism is fairly mum on conservation too—the environment is what you scurry through to get to synagogue—though some of the newer, touchier-feelier offshoots, such as Reconstructionism, try to correct that by occasionally holding a service outdoors.
      But this group not only promotes the idea that religious values are environmental values, but are gathering all faiths under the same tent in their efforts to heal the world physically while nurturing it spiritually. Christians. Muslims. Jews. The invocation was delivered by Dr. Manish Shah, of the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago—Jainism is an ancient Indian faith that stresses nonviolence toward all living things, so he fit right in. Dr. Shah brought his mother up to deliver the benediction he had known as a child. 
     The main speaker was Rev. Doc. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on West 95th Street, who spoke of putting a green roof on the church (some old school parishioners wondered aloud at the barber shop why he was putting a putting green on top of the church) updating Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" in to "by any greens necessary," and was so forceful and entertaining that I was tempted to go up to him after and say, "Is there still time to get you to run for mayor in February? Because we need someone to scare Rahm." Maybe next time.
     The luncheon—vegetarian, natch—ended, and I never really got the chance to talk to my host, Rev. Sauder, which was too bad. He has a degree in natural resources and environmental sciences from the University of Illinois, a masters in religion from the Urbana Theological Seminary and and MBA, which makes him not quite your stereotypical Bible thumping preacher from Tazewell County, where he grew up. Some other time perhaps.
     On my way out the door, an interesting occurrence. I hurried to the coat closet, but my raincoat wasn't there. I went through each hanger carefully, Once, twice, three times. It still wasn't there. My good Burberry raincoat. Ah, but there was a second closet -- I had never been to the hall before, on the second floor of UBS Tower. Relieved, I went to that closet. The coat wasn't there either. Meanwhile, another man arrived and announced that he couldn't find his coat. "No kindness goes unpunished," he said. Having company seemed to confirm that we had been robbed. A spree. I felt a sinking feeling, an awful, is-this-happening? pit of the stomach feeling. A big sign on the closet said, in essence, "If you lose your coat, tough." I would have to go report my loss to Rev. Sauder. That seemed necessary, but really, what could he do about it? The poor man would be embarrassed. Why had I come to this at all? I looked one more time. The number coats were thinning out. Nothing on the floor. Maybe somebody had taken it by mistake...nah. That wouldn't happen to two coats. The do-gooders have been fleeced while listening to talks about bees and flowers.
    I was slowly walking back into the hall to deliver the bad news to the minister when I noticed a third closet. There my coat was. I put it on with joy.
     "Thank you God!" I exuded, out loud, quite the departure from my attitude at the beginning of lunch. I smiled at myself, recognizing how, in moments of duress, or relief, suddenly the long-scorned deity takes form before your eyes. As I once told my older son: "When you find yourself in jail—and trust me here—suddenly there's a God." I suppose I do believe, but in what George Carlin called "The God of the Car Keys." When you lose something, it's, "please God, help me find it!" Or, I suppose, when you find something you thought you had lost, He's the guy you thank, despite yourself.
   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Now this is strange. It kinds looks like a bank vault, but it's not. Or a crypt of some kind, which is also way off. It's in the private zones of a semi-public building, far underground, and that's all I should say, because you guys have been nailing these so consistently.
     Better for me to talk about today's prize, a bag of whole bean, full-bodied, richly wonderful Bubbly Creek Coffee from the good folks at Bridgeport Coffee. I've been drinking this stuff hand-over-fist: it's knocked Cafe du Monde right out of the No. 1 spot, just by its consistent drinkability and robust wonderfulness.
     You know the drill. Place your guesses below. Good luck, though at this point you should be wishing that to me.

Rolling Stone has second thoughts

University of Virginia

    I've been meaning to point this out for a while, as this whole rape-on-campus dialogue grew, and today's announcement from Rolling Stone seems as good a time as any. 

      If the problem were professors’ children being kidnapped and held for ransom, nobody would talk about the ability of universities to investigate and solve these cases. Nobody would demand they develop systems for better analyzing ransom notes. We would look to the police. Such crimes are their responsibility.
     Yet when the crime is women being raped on campus, however, for some reason colleges themselves are expected to step in as surrogates for the cops, who are thought to be ... what? Too insensitive, too public, too something? I’ve never read an adequate explanation. Yes, police departments sometimes mishandle sexual assault, but given the ways schools routinely minimize, cover up and botch rape investigations, or fail to punish perpetrators when they do determine guilt, it’s hard to imagine how they could really do a worse job of it.
     The University of Virginia became embroiled in scandal last month after publication of a Rolling Stone story about “Jackie,” a freshman who was raped, supposedly, in 2012. It is an example of what happens when crimes are not reported when they occur. The details, as published by the magazine, are shocking. No boozy seduction that shifted into coercion, but a brutal three-hour gang rape, allegedly, by seven members of the Phi Psi fraternity, that left Jackie bleeding and dazed.
     She did not go to the hospital. She did not call police. Her friends talked her out of it.
     “We’ll never be allowed into any frat party again,” one says. Astounding.
     After the story, “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was published in October, repercussions were swift — bad national publicity prods inert schools into action, another reason these crimes must be reported. The school suspended its Greek program while it investigated the charges.
     Since then, holes were punched in the story. The frat did not actually hold any events the weekend of the supposed party. People she had named as members were not, in fact, members of the frat.
     On Friday, Rolling Stone stepped back.
     “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” editor Will Dana wrote in a statement. “We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.”
     A little late to be taking this seriously. Rolling Stone (and I should say, for full disclosure, I wrote a number of articles for the magazine in the 1990s) had a duty to find out exactly what had happened before going with the story, not afterward. Apologizing now for causing a fuss is lame.
     “Discrepancies” do not mean a story is made up. You would expect a person undergoing such trauma to get a few things wrong. Another reason why it’s important for them to a) call the police and b) go to the hospital and collect forensic evidence.
     Without calling the police, the risk of crimes going unpunished, or ignored, rises. Because we live in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and we would not want to live in a place where that wasn’t true. While most rape accusations are not fabricated, some are, enough that we insist that the accused get their day in court, or their say in an article tarring a fraternity and a university.
     This is not to let schools off the hook. They have a responsibility to see that students who are found to have committed these crimes suffer repercussions. One major reason women are reluctant to report rape is that, even when the case is solid, all too often no one is punished but themselves, for having spoken out. That has to change.
     Yet, this story did not appear in a vacuum, but in a political setting where the rights of victims, and supposed victims, are trumping the rights of people being accused, both truly and, at times, falsely. Politically correct dating rituals also creep into the issue, muddying it further.
     Now the threat is that the pendulum will go the other way. That frat louts and colleges under the gun to provide safer environments will heave a sigh of relief and say, “See, it wasn’t true.”
     That is a mistake. First, this case could still be true. Second, even if this particular crime did not occur, rapes regularly happen on campuses, and colleges must do a better job of teaching students how to react: by calling the police, by going a to hospital.

Is it okay to get a needy child a dog toy for Christmas?

      Eleven months a year we get to be as selfish as we please, maximizing our advantage, straddling our small piles of loot, grinning, marveling at the view.

      But come December, well, a new dynamic kicks in. Echoes of a birth long ago, if you prefer, or a cultural cross check, a glance at society’s weakest members before we all plunge into the icy slush of winter and our hearts freeze up along with everything else.

     We don’t start caring for just anybody, of course. That would strain our delicate systems. So I’m not being called upon to buy some 24-year-old dishwasher those Dr. Dre headphones he’s had his eye on. 

Children, though, are a different matter. Somehow their poverty registers, cuts through our fog of self and raises a tingle in our anthracite hearts, as strangers are asked to help out their struggling parents. 

      The display went up in our office. Tinsel. Christmas stockings. Ornaments. A basket of letters from boys, a basket from girls—an odd distinction. Perhaps a bid to encourage response by tossing gender solidarity into the mix. A chance to buy a firetruck or doll for that son or daughter you never had. 

     Why should I take the time and money to benefit an unknown kid? One known only by a single, hand-scrawled note? Because I am a sap, and can imagine the poor kid staring at the empty spot beneath the tree if I don’t. Life disappoints soon enough. It shouldn’t disappoint you when what you want most in the world is a remote control dune buggy. 

     Sighing—sap, sap, sap—I pick the top letter, from a 1st grader at Burroughs Elementary, where 99 percent of the students live in poverty. “Dear Santa,” it begins, promisingly. “How are you? How are the reindeer and Mrs. Claus? When I go to school I always do my best...” And so on. “Can you please bring me a soccer goal net, soccer goalie gloves and soccer shoe spikes...”

     Hmm...that’s quite a request. I envision myself at the register at Dick’s Sporting Goods. “That’ll be $312.47, please, Mr. Sap.”
     Perhaps just picking the top letter shows a failure of initiative on my part. Maybe the letter underneath it is even more worthy.
    "Dear Santa Clause" - a future lawyer, perhaps - "I have been very good. How is Mrs. Clause?" Etc. "I would love a new pair of sneakers or legos and a game for a PS3 it's called Batman arkham Asylum. Please!"
     The specific game gives me pause. Not for the price, but the quest. I remember racing miserably from store to store as time ran out - should have ordered online! Looking for a certain doll, a Little Miss Twisted Bodi Image, ending up with its generic equivalent, the Miss Tax Free Industrial Zone Young Person Figurine, knowing I was both going to trouble and disappoint a child.
     I realize that, left on my own, I will paw through the letters until I find a child asking for old notebooks, so beseech a young co-worker to just pick a letter for me. She does.
     "Dear Santa," begins Rashel, a first-grader. "Good evening Santa Claus. How are you? And how are the reindeer? Can you tell me? I help my mama a lot with the washing can you please send me a stuffed santa claus toy, a one Direction cd? Or a doll. Please bring me these. I will be happy."
     Off to Target. The CD is easy; the stuffed Santa, not so much. I don't wander Targets much — are the other shoppers always so stunned looking? Kinda grim. Like survivors stumbling out of a disaster. Plenty of Santa ornaments. Santa hats. I spy the perfect stuffed Santa. Cute, nylon, $9.99. Well, that was easy. As I get closer I notice a possible sticking point. Santa is a dog toy. No worries, I think: the tag can be clipped off and the child no wiser. I pick it up. An entire cloth saddle hangs below. A "Santa Rider" dog toy designed to ride on the back of a dog. Insulting and cruel. I examine the juncture between Santa and the brown saddle. Perhaps it could be cut away. I put it back, thinking of both the brown residue at Santa's bottom and the shame of buying a needy child a dog toy for Christmas.      

     Michaels? Nothing. Pier One? A soft Santa beckons. No, he's a wine bottle cover. Hurrying through the aisles, a big, round, friendly, Santa bobs into view, his coat a soft wide twill. Hardly daring to hope, I pick it up; not a tea cosy, not a purse. Just a stuffed Santa, hands flung wide, waiting to hug a 6-year-old girl. I check the price, can't find it, shrug. These things are made by slaves in China; how much could it be? To the register: $32. I gulp. Guess they're treating those sweatshop workers better lately. Easier to pay the freight than continue the quest.
     If a person as selfish and cheap as myself can do this, so can you. You can get your letter to Santa by visiting suntimes.com/Santa, or calling 312-300-4193 until Dec. 16.

Neil Steinberg, not dead at 54.

    Several readers of yesterday's column on advance obituaries wondered if I had written my own obit. I answered, "Of course not." A person is too biased, too clouded by the fog of self, to write his or her own obituary. I remember a late colleague—Bill Braden—who did do exactly that, leave his own obit behind when he retired from the paper, and it was both leaden and puffed up and I deleted it and wrote his obit myself, when the time came. I'd hate to fall into the same trap, eyes wide open. 
     But one reader persisted. Sure, it would be biased, he said, but "I'd read it and I think I would enjoy that unique insight Maybe you should write it as a column!"
     Hmmm.... while I am not a short order cook, or a cocktail lounge pianist taking requests, there is an idea there. Almost a challenge. Sure, it might be a mistake, but it could be my mistake. Suddenly refusing to do it seemed, not prudence, or modesty, but a kind of cowardice, and I thought it might be fun to give it a crack and see the result, which you will find below. If it's wrong, well, I'll try again with something else tomorrow.
     Since people skim these things, and can be surprisingly thick (I sure can be; for years I thought the Kinks song "Lola" was about a girl), I should clearly state that, as of Wednesday evening, NEIL STEINBERG IS NOT DEAD, and while my dying in the night before this is automatically posted would be one of those just-too-strange ironic marvels that get so much play online, I'm not planning on that. Though if I do expire suddenly, through a wild coincidence, take comfort that I would savor the ensuing spurt of attention which, as you can glean from this obit, is generally in short supply, at least compared to my expectations. Not that I'm complaining. It's been a swell life, in the main, even boiled down to a thousand words. 

     Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis—in English, "Juvenal"—was a Roman poet, little known today and, judging from the utter lack of mention of him in contemporary writings of his era, and his own bitter complaints, also little known during his own lifetime, in the late first and early second century A.D., when he wrote the 16 satires that have come down to us today, concerning a range of topics, from the viciousness of women to cannibalism in Egypt. Juvenal always seems to be crouching in some rich patron's doorway, waiting hours to be seen, wondering if there'll be any table scraps left from the feast the night before.
     Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, was a fan of Juvenal's acid wit, not only reading him with savor, but taking comfort from Juvenal's life when considering his own career spent churning out daily journalism, essays that could be sharp and funny, and strove to cast an intelligent eye on his times. Despite being well-wrought, his work had no discernible impact on the world around him, other than to serve as his livelihood and keep what small band of readers he had generally entertained, or at least occupied.
     Steinberg, XX, died WHEN and WHERE.
     His columns in the Sun-Times, which he began writing in 1996, and his various articles and editorials, reflected his wide range of interests: reading, Chicago history, opera, science, math. He would comment on the news of the moment, but also delve into obscure areas as diverse as the concrete industry, a group collecting dead birds that strike buildings downtown, and the translation of show tunes into sign language. He particularly enjoyed visiting unusual factories and businesses, and wrote columns on the cardboard tube trade, the manufacture of table pads, and the S&M dungeon on Lake Street.
     He was the author of eight books, also on odd subjects, from his first, a history of college pranks, to "Hatless Jack," a book about the decline of the men's hat industry, to his pending volume, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," which uses poetry to help alcoholics and drug addicts strive toward sobriety. It was written with New York author Sara Bader, and The University of Chicago Press is publishing the book in 2016. He cared deeply about his books, and it's telling that he would use his own obituary to plug them. 
     Neil Steinberg was born in Ohio and grew up in Berea, a small town in the western suburbs of Cleveland. His father Robert was a nuclear physicist who spent most of his career at NASA and later painted. His mother June taught students with learning disabilities. 
     He wrote a column for his junior high school and high school newspapers, and came to the Chicago area to attend Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1982. 
     Steinberg initially intended to be a novelist or humorist, finishing a novel at the Ragdale writers' colony in Lake Forest, and publishing humor in magazines like the National Lampoon and Spy, and writing for several programs on the Nickelodeon cable channel. But his day job as an editor and columnist at the Barrington Courier Review led to a job at the now defunct Wheaton Daily Journal which led to the Sun-Times. He joined the staff in 1987.
     He also wrote for many other publications, such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Forbes and the New York Daily News.
     In 2008, he wrote a memoir of his struggles with alcohol, "Drunkard," and the process of accepting his alcoholism made him better able to accept everything else, including his humble position well toward the bottom of the greased pole of money and status. He felt blessed that he truly enjoyed researching topics, setting words down, and having the freedom to select his own subjects, generally. He decided that he might as well be content with how things turned out, because there was no changing them now and, besides, as with Juvenal, perhaps someday somebody would determine that it had actually meant something significant after all.
     On July 1, 2013, he began a daily blog, everygoddamnday.com, as the name implied, writing every single day, without fail, and took satisfaction in the idea that it would sit in cyberspace, if not forever then for a long time, serving as a kind of rump immortality, and such people who might be interested could visit it and perhaps take away something valuable, such as his favorite lines from Juvenal, this description, from the Third Satire, of the cranky Roman pundit's envy of an aristocrat in a sedan chair navigating a congested marketplace:

    The crossing of wagons in the narrow winding streets, the slanging of drovers when brought to a stand ... When the rich man has a call of social duty, the mob makes way for him as he is borne swiftly over their heads in a huge Liburnian car. He writes or reads or sleeps inside as he goes along for the closed window of the litter induces slumber. Yet he will arrive before us; hurry as we may, we are blocked by a surging crowd in front, and by a dense mass of people pressing in on us from behind: one man digs an elbow into me, another a hard sedan-pole; one bangs a beam and another a wine-cask against my head. My legs are beplastered with mud; soon huge feet trample on me from every side, and a soldier plants his hobnails firmly on my toe.

     Steinberg loved that last detail, the centurion stepping on Juvenal's foot. He felt it reached across some 1900 years and made the vexing commotion of ancient Rome come alive again. He strove to do something similar for early 21st century Chicago and fancied that, occasionally, he succeeded. Whether anyone will care 1900 years from now is impossible to say, but, as Steinberg would observe, were he alive, "A fellow is allowed to hope."
     Survivors include his wife Edie, sons Ross and Kent, as well as his parents, his sister Deborah and brother Samuel. Services are private.