The Don Quixote of the Highway Sign

     

     Steven J. Bahnsen is on time, of course. His 2009 Chevy Cobalt with 329,000 miles on it pulls up in front of the newspaper at exactly the appointed hour.
     "I'm a man that's on time," he says.
     Bahnsen is also a man who knows how to file a Freedom of Information request, how to comb public records and master federal guidelines, how to attend public meetings, persist with government officials and nag media representatives.
     He also gives a good tour.
     "I'm looking for Interstate 90/94. Where is it?" he demands, as we sweep toward the expressway.
     I point out a green "90/94" sign just up ahead, to the left.
    "That's one of the signs," he replies. "They're supposed to have a sign that says 'Junction 90/94' before it. You don't just pop up all of a sudden and say, here's an interstate. You're supposed to have a sign that says there's a junction there."
     A fine distinction perhaps, but you are not Steven Bahnsen, a man in relentless pursuit of his passion: to make sure that the street signs of Chicago are exactly as they should be. It's a big job: in 2014, IDOT repaired or replaced 35,000 street signs and installed another 3,000 new ones.
     We are on our way to Englewood.

     "The bulk of these are on the South Side," he says of missing and deficient signs.
     "Why the South Side?" I ask.
     "Why does the South Side get garbage all the time?" replies Bahnsen, who lives at Michigan and 29th Street.
     Bahnsen is 62. He wears a coat and tie, a blue raincoat and a fedora. Born in Iowa, he has a well-developed sense of How Things Should Be, maintaining a simmering indignation over a variety of government lapses that most people barely notice. Nor are missing signs the only official misdeeds that stick in his craw. Chicago Police driving their squads in Schiller Park, which is definitely not in Chicago, is another. He mentions it several times.
     Bahnsen is no stranger to government himself; a retired postal carrier, he navigates the city effortlessly.
     "I delivered mail in Garfield Park," he says. "Once you can handle that, you can handle anything. The rest of the city is Disneyland."
     Not that he is engaged in a purely altruistic pursuit. At some point, his sense of personal grievance, built up over years of pursuit of the quest, competes with the quest itself.
     "There are two factors at play here," he says. "One is the bad signs. The other is IDOT's attitude about me. It's a toss-up about which one is worse."
     And what is that attitude?
     "We are discussing a letter instructing him to cease all contact with IDOT," William R. Frey, then-acting director of highways at IDOT, now retired, wrote on Dec. 5, 2011, in an email obtained by Bahnsen through an FOI request. "His claims are frivolous, take up staff time and cost the taxpayers money. He's been doing this for years."
     Forty years, according to Bahnsen.
     In an hour with him, I did not find outrageous signage voids. More like missing details. An "Exit" sign on the Ryan that's supposed to include the exit number. Vague signage pointing out an expressway obviously in front of you.
     Although he does have a point about all the signs pointing to the "22nd Street" exit on the Dan Ryan. "There is no 22nd Street!" he exudes, almost joyously. "It's Cermak Road!"
     The name was changed in 1933: apparently not everyone has gotten word.
     The Illinois Tollway is also on the receiving end of Bahnsen's endless queries, though it doesn't have a problem with Bahnsen.
     "We've been corresponding with Mr. Bahnsen since 2011 on the placement of exit signs on the Tollway," says Wendy Abrams, chief of communications for the Tollway, calling Bahnsen "helpful." "He has been a patient and persistent advocate—writing to us from time to time and attending public meetings."
      Bahlsen never tires of pointing out the problem.
     "Now this is 31st Street," he says. "Say you're coming from the west on 31st. And you were told to take I-94 to go downtown. What do you do? Where do I turn? Are there any signs for I-94? There used to be [signs] over there but they got knocked down and they won't put them back up."
     Why is this important to him?
     "It just shows to me the way government's not working," he says.
     As reluctant as I am to invite so diligent a man into my world, I have to admit that I like Bahnsen, though I could see that changing as the years wore on. Most people care about themselves only: their jobs, their family. Rare is the person who cares about much beyond themselves, and then it is a passing, hobbyist interest. To care deeply about something as abstract as proper highway signage, well, I'd say that there is a certain purity to it, one that demands respect, if not awe. Yes, what Steven J. Bahnsen cares about passionately might strike you as trivial. But what do you care about that's more important? Not only care about, but act upon? What?

Puppetry Week #1: "Puppets are fighting for respect"

     

Cynthia VonOrthal displays a shadow puppet at her puppetry studio in Evanston.

     Puppets are the ambassadors of the obscure and the uncanny. The history of the art form is "easier researched in police records than in theater chronicles" according to Peter Schumann, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater, an entertainment forever mired in "its own secret and demeaning stature."
     Puppets are by definition low-tech: if there isn't a person with his hand up that sock, or manipulating those strings, or running the show somewhere, then it isn't really a puppet, it's a doll or a robot.     

     This odd subcellar of culture, part sculpture, part folk art, part vaudeville, also has personal appeal to me. There is a kinship between journalism and puppetry. Both require dedicated craftsmen, albeit in dwindling numbers, practicing a profession that neither thrives nor vanishes, but somehow remains perpetually defunct. Both are rough simulacra of life; both had some legendary moment in the cultural spotlight in the hazy past—Hayden composed puppet operas for the royal court, a popular puppet dinner theater was steps off Michigan Avenue—but now linger on in the margins, practiced by various oddballs and misfits. I've never told anybody who asks me what I do for a living that I'm a puppeteer, but were I to, I'm certain it would be met with the exact same blank look. mixing pity and indifference, that "newspaper columnist" elicits.

     My take on puppets wasn't always so complicated. When I first joined the paper, puppets were merely the kind of marginality that caught my interest. I would flip through the phone book, looking for strange subjects to write about. A scribe. Chicago's last coal hauler. I was entranced that there was a Chicago Puppetry Guild, and a number of puppet theaters, which led to this article 20 years ago. I didn't even have any kids yet.

     On Wednesday, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival kicks off in Chicago. And while theatrical puppetry has an airiness that I generally shun—I'd rather see a "Punch and Judy" show on a portable stage in a public park than "Oedipus Rex" performed by marionettes at the Goodman—I thought I would dub this week "Puppetry Week" on EGDD and feature a puppetry-related post every day for the next seven days. I will talk to the festival's founder, attend what events I can, publishing new stories and photos and reprinting old articles written over the years about Chicago puppetry.

     I'll also remind you of recent puppet posts, such as my visit to the deeply-strange Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky over the summer.

     And for those who just can't bear the prospect of that much puppetry, I won't neglect the non-puppeting world: Monday's column from the Sun-Times will be posted here at 12 noon, and each afternoon of Puppetry Week, I'll make sure there is an update from elsewhere. But at least give the puppet stuff a nibble. It's a surprisingly compelling realm, or so I've long thought. 

     As always, thanks for bearing with me. 


      You've probably never seen one of Dave Herzog's marionettes take a bow. It does not snap forward at the waist, jerkily, the way the adjective "puppetlike" would suggest. 
    

     Rather, the bow is a graceful sweep downward, head inclined just so, with one hand fluttering modestly in the vicinity of the mouth, the other trailing behind, arched, a bit of suppressed theatricality. 
    

     Many might be surprised to still find puppets at all—bowing, juggling, leaping, dancing - in the small AnimArt Puppet Theater on North Kedzie, one of half a dozen puppet theaters and troupes making a living in Chicago. 
    

     The puppets, today a circus of mice, go through their paces in front of 60 squealing, delighted schoolchildren who, despite the deadening impact of video games and VCRs and cable television, still enjoy this ancient entertainment. 
     
     "Puppetry is probably the oldest theatrical art form in the world," said Herzog, also is president of the 75-member Chicagoland Puppetry Guild. "There is not any culture in the world, any race of people that does not have a form of puppetry." 
     
     The children are first- and second-graders, prime age for most puppet audiences. 
    

     "The performance window is getting much smaller; by the time they are 9, 10 years old, they have been exposed to so much high-tech entertainment that anything requiring the use of imagination has less appeal to them," said Herzog. "Puppets are not high-tech." 
    

     Yet puppetry is not just for children. The first thing a puppeteer will tell you — after explaining that, no, these puppets are not store-bought, they are meticulously handcrafted — is that puppetry is an art that can be enjoyed by adults. 
    

     "Puppets are fighting for respect," said Michael Schwabe, artistic director of Hystopolis Puppet Theatre, 441 W. North. While kiddie shows are the theater's "bread and butter," Hystopolis also performs work for grown-ups: plays such as Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," or its new production, "King Ubu" by the French surrealist Alfred Jarre. 
    

     Bill Henderson, president of AnimArt, is working on the production of an evening of Becket plays. He admits that the notion of puppetry as kiddie entertainment is difficult to overcome. 
    

     "I once did a production of Ibsen's `Peer Gynt,' and people would call up wanting to bring their children," he said. "I would tell them that the opening scene is a rape, that there is full frontal nudity, and they would say: `It's a puppet show; I'm bringing my kids.' " 
    

     The very adult taste of opera is the sole repertoire of William Fosser's "Opera in Focus," a lush production of fantastically detailed puppets acting out famous operas on a splendid gilded stage. 
    

     Fosser was once artistic director of the Kungsholm Miniature Grande Opera, which Chicagoans of a certain age will remember as having once occupied the space where Lawry's restaurant is today. Kungsholm closed in 1971, and Fosser went on to a career in movie set design, on such films as "The Sting" and "Home Alone." But after retiring from the movie business he revived the puppet opera, which has now found a home, a bit incongruously, in the basement of the Park District building in Rolling Meadows. 
    

     After each performance, Fosser leads the audience backstage, where elaborate Egyptian costumes from "Aida" wait on tiny mannequins, and sets from "La Boheme" are protected by custom-made twill dust covers. 
    

     "I'm interested in their realizing this is an art form, and what goes into it," said Fosser, 65. "Some say the trip backstage is as exciting as the performance." 
    

     A puppet endures a lot of wear and tear—once, during "Lohengrin," the swan's head fell off in mid-performance. Constant maintenance is essential. 
    

      Before an afternoon practice run-through of "Faust," 
Fosser's assistant, Paul Guerra, carefully applies clear nail polish to Cho-Cho-San, the heroine from "Madame Butterfly." 
    

     "That way," he explains, evenly, lest his hand shake, "when the light catches her just right, people swear the lips move." 
    

     As much as Herzog, Henderson, Fosser and Guerra have to scrape by to make a living, they are the puppetry elite in the sense that they have permanent spaces to perform. 
    

      The majority of puppeteers are like Steven Finnegan, traveling to birthday parties, church picnics and senior centers. 
    

     "It's a dying breed. If I had to just make my living as a puppeteer I probably couldn't do it," said Finnegan, 45. "I'm also a clown." 
    

     Finnegan said he wished that parents looking to entertain their children would consider puppets, instead of automatically turning to magicians and clowns. 
    

     "Think about clowns," said Finnegan. "There are a zillion clowns and all of them work. I know a guy who charges $120 to bounce around in a Barney costume. I come in, set up a theater and a sound system and do a full production for 45 minutes — a much better entertainment value — and I can only charge $135 for a birthday party." 
  

      "People don't understand that it's a profession," said Herzog. 
                                                   

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 29, 1994

-->

"Life Never Becomes Dull..."

     A Medill student came by my office the other day to research a paper—drawn, I was amused to note, not through the column, but through the blog—and asked why I became a writer. I thought about being a kid, staring out the window of Fairwood Elementary School, bored and trying to conjure up wonders to distract myself. I told him that I became a writer because I was trying to keep life interesting. 

      As I got older, however, I realized that life is always interesting. Endlessly complex and fascinating. It is we who either notice it or, all too frequently, don't.

      That is the theme of the 2015 Everygoddamnday.com poster, which I am happy to unveil. Like last year's, it was produced by Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee, with the help of Carl, one of their six, count 'em, six steampunk designers on staff.  I should also give a thanks to James Smith, our own award-winning designer at the newspaper. I assumed I would change the color scheme this year—shake it up—particularly after a reader objected that the black-and-red made him think of the Nazi flag.

One of my favorite spots, the Book Bin, 1151 Church St.
in Northbrook, was the first place to display the poster.

      But James argued against that, conjuring up McDonald's and the value of consistency in branding. Works for them, or did. So black and red it is, at least for another year.

     While last year I did get them up in store windows around Chicago, I balked at actually pasting them to walls outdoors—except outside Powell's Books in Hyde Park, which encourages it. It's harder to actually do that than you might expect, and after I passed a guy on a stepladder, vigorously taking a razor blade to a handbill stuck to a brick wall in an alley, I realized: everywhere belongs to somebody, and I wouldn't want anyone to see one of these posters and think, "Oh shit." 

      But I see areas in Wicker Park that are crammed with posters—it seems permitted—and I'm going to make greater effort to get more up this year. As with last year, if you have a business, a place of public accommodation, and want one, let me know and I'll not only send you one, I'll post a picture of it on display in your establishment. Publicity for the both of us. 

You can still buy the old one

    Otherwise, you can also buy them. I've decided to keep the price the same—a reasonable $15, plus $6 for shipping and handling. The poster will arrive in a handsome, sturdy, re-usable cardboard tube manufactured right here in the city at Chicago Mailing Tube, 400 North Levitt. 

     Mail your check to Neil Steinberg, 2000 Center Ave., Northbrook, IL 60062. The poster is suitable for framing, and I've appreciated when readers have sent me photos of their photos, decorating their libraries and dens. 

    I thought perhaps I should stop selling the old posters, out of principle, but I've still got a few, and so those will remain on sale for the time being.  

     I think the new poster conveys a useful message. Life is a long time (as T.S. Eliot said). Its joy and fascination can sometimes fade, particularly as the years grind on. It is incumbent upon ourselves, if we want to lead happy lives, to realize it is ourselves, not life, that occasionally loses its edge, and thus we need to renew ourselves, to sharpen ourselves. I like to think this blog can help in that process. I know I need it.

The poster in the window of Turn The Tables, a delightful upscale consignment furniture shop at 1955 Cherry Lane in Northbrook that also features the lovely refinishing work of its co-owner, Melly Schwartz. 

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     Who knows how many churches are in Chicago?
     I wouldn't hazard a guess—one local TV station estimated 6,000, but they didn't source that figure.
     Though it sounds about right.
     Of course first, you'd have to define what you mean by "churches"?
     Does that refer to church buildings? Because some of those are empty, or have been pressed into other purposes. There's a church on the North Side that was made into condos. Is it still a "church?"
     Or a congregations? Because many of those meet in storefronts.
     It isn't as if the city keeps a master church list, to my knowledge. You don't have to register your church, or get a church license.
     This lovely structure caught my eye during my wanderings around the city this week, for its charming maroon-roofed tower, and its matching awning announcing "LOVE."
      (And yes, I plugged those into Google to see if they give the game away: they don't. Lots of churches, lots of love).
      So where is this particular church?
      I've gone through something of a transformation during the "Saturday Fun Activity" process. As much as I want to stump you guys, I think part of me will be sad when that finally happens, if it finally happens, the way the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series drained away a little of the specialness that came from their long string of defeats. As thwarted as I've been in my attempts to frustrate the Hive, I think when I eventually do—perhaps with this church, hiding in plain sight—it'll be a melancholy victory.
     Or heck, maybe I'll be triumphant. Hard to predict these things.
     So place your guesses below. The winner gets a package of excellent Bridgeport coffee. Except for Dale—he's already got his. When I shipped him his prize package for last Saturday, I tucked in an extra bag, as an advance against his next victory. Seemed an efficiency. I probably should have shipped three. Good luck to all. And if it's King Dale, well, I'm okay with that too. 

Postscript
     In case this put you in the mood for more photos of churches—and synagogues, and mosques—the winner, who photographed the church above last year, shared a website, "Chicago Houses of Worship" featuring thousands of pictures of, well, you know. 

"So these three terrorists walk into a bar..."

     

     The slaughter at Parisian satiric weekly is an attack against the fraternity of the irreverent.  We who don't accept the world as it is given to them, the way true believers and zealots do, but who scoff, who doubt, who question and criticize and complain.
     That's me. I've been a wisenheimer all my life. Snide, sarcastic. Even as a child. 

     When I grew up, and started writing, poking fun at stuff came naturally. The first piece of writing I sold for money was to National Lampoon in 1980. Since then I've written for Spy, for Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards, for Rolling Stone. My column at the Sun-Times is not what I would call a beacon of gravitas.  

      Mockery is my business. I'm not of the Charlie Hebdo mold, only because they were so ... what? So French, with all those sloppy kissing cartoons. So European, meaning they slid into an easy xenophobia. They'd reply by saying they made fun of everyone, but you still had to wonder whose side they're on. Not my taste, but not something people should be killed over, either.  

     Friday's column required a balance, and I hope I pulled it off. Basically I wrote what I felt, what struck me as funny and, to my delight, the paper printed it. 

     And if it seems like I'm joking about tragic issues, well, you kind of have to. That's what Charlie Hebdo was all about, and our response should do no less.

     Knock-knock

     Who's there?

     Muhammad.

     Muhammad who?

     It better be Muhammad Ali, or you're in trouble.

     That isn't funny. But then, knock knock jokes are never particularly funny. They're more about wordplay ("Lettuce in, it's cold out here") and bad puns that cause 6-year-olds to spurt milk out their noses.

     Although, as jokes sometimes do, the one above, which was written by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune (psst, non potential terrorists: it as-way eally-ray itten-wray by e-may) , illustrates a truth that might jar if stated plainly:

     Terrorism works.

     For all the "Not Afraid" bluster that came in the wake of the slaughter of 12 staffers at the Charlie Hebdo satiric newspaper in Paris, there is a chilling effect. There has to be.  "Will this get me killed?" is not a question conducive to humor. Even the Onion, in its typically dead-on response to the Paris massacre, sounded a note more somber than hilarious, under the headline: "It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives at Risk," written in an intentionally unattributed, vague, will-we-die-if-we-say-this? fashion:

     "Today’s horrific events only reinforce the idea that we cannot and will not let extremist zealots dictate what we can and cannot say,” is a comment that we will quote, but one that we do with a legitimate sense of uncertainty over whether it could incite an attack against the speaker or their loved ones, a sense of uncertainty that feels awful, grotesque, and wholly unnecessary in this day and age.

     That isn't funny, or rather, is funny in a dry, puff-cheeks-and-sigh-kind of way. If you compare that piece to the one the Onion ran immediately after the 9/11 attacks, with the 19 hijackers shocked to find themselves roasting in hell, you can almost think that Western society has slid backward in 13 years, that our freewheeling freedoms have lost a step in the face of a constant stream of videos of journalist beheadings and bus bombings and the like.

     Myself, I never worry about that kind of thing, because I sincerely believe I'm not important enough to kill. Plus, at 54, I've already had the good part of my life and now comes the dismal denouemont of failing body, failing finances and descent into utter obscurity. Maybe having it all end in a white flash might not be such a horrible thing.
    

     No, I don't believe in mocking God for a variety of reasons. Everyone needs to claim false significance for something, and whether it's opera or football or a loving deity is merely a matter of personal style. If God is imaginary, so is Carmen, and I wouldn't want anybody claiming that makes the whole pageant a waste of time.
     Yes, one is tempted to blaspheme the prophet on general principles, to show that we can. The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has coined a variety of explicit jokes about Muhammad that I would share, except I believe doing so is wrong. Muslims in this country are members of an extreme minority whose position is only undercut by brutal acts such as we saw this week. The irony is that the attackers are in silent conspiracy with haters everywhere. A fringe zero commits a crime, and others claim it somehow represents the whole. Arguing that the crime in Paris reflects on Islam is like insisting that Bernie Madoff indicts Jews.
     And no, Zorn hasn't really done any of that. He's a good friend of mine, or was, before I dragged him into this. I just think the notion of projecting these dangerous, imaginary insults upon him is funny.
     But that would change if somebody threw a brick at his house. Or mine. We have to hold, on faith, that we haven't passed some kind of tipping point where jokes are not allowed. I don't want to pretend that Islamic radicals invented terrorizing those who disagree with their dogma. We in the U.S. have a long, rich history of doing just that, from John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts to the 1960s South, where supporting voting rights could and did get you killed.
     One of the dozen Charlie Hebdo staffers killed was Stephane Charbonnier, editor and cartoonist. The magazine had been threatened and firebombed before, and in 2012 he said something worth repeating:
     "Muhammad isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law."
     Charbonnier said something else: "I'd rather die standing than live on my knees."
     This is a moment of truth, where we decide whether to cower in fear or stand up. I admire Zorn for standing up and boldly insulting Islamic terrorists everywhere, almost daring them to come after him. I only wish I had his courage.

Tis the season, for flu

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.

     Shortly after 9 a.m. I heard it for the first time. An eight-second message, I learned when, after hearing it for 10 minutes or so, I took out a stopwatch and timed it, along with the gap before the message repeated.
     

     Every seven seconds. Like a ball peen hammer tapping against the side of my head.
     

     I wondered if, assuming I ever get through to the nurse, and assuming she gives me an appointment to see the doctor, whether I should ask: "I assume the purpose of the message is to thin the herd of sick callers waiting for help."
      
     But doctors can react poorly to that kind of thing. They don't like to be questioned. And they are genuinely busy. This year's influenza outbreak started early, hit harder, and is now widespread in 43 states; 21 children have died. Serious stuff.
     

     Particularly when it happens to you. The Steinberg household is not faring well. My younger son succumbed a day or two before New Year's and has been battling it for a week. My wife was felled like a tree over the weekend. I assumed I was immune because of my hardy Eastern European lineage and general bullets-will-not-harm-us exceptionalism.
     

     Then I started to cough. And sneeze. And get ... well, achy. And very tired.
     

     Nothing to bother a doctor with. I'm a big believer in soldiering on, waiting and letting things go away. But my wife, God bless her, insisted, I get tested. If I catch the flu early, she said, I can take something called "Tamaflu" which will shave off a few days of misery. If I don't have it, I can get a vaccine, which are 50 percent effective in good years, but only 33 percent effective this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

     

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.

     "Influenza" is an interesting word. Italian, obviously, for "influence," and it refers, not to what a person needs to get through to a doctor quickly, but to astrology. In the Middle Ages, people though the stars influenced illness (some still do, but that's a different column) bringing sickness on, particularly plagues and general outbreaks, and the word was applied first to any sort of epidemic, then to a certain kind of contagious respiratory ailment previously known as "la grippe."
     

     "News from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there call'd the Influenza" The London Magazine reported in 1743.
  
   

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
     

     Half an hour. I'd say they've blown "promptly." Let me say, lest I malign hardworking, dedicated professionals, that I've gotten my health care there for years, and am always very happy with their treatment, and I'm sure I would be happy again now. If they'd pick up the phone.
     

     Do I even need to go? The CDC points out that you shouldn't seek medical attention unless you are in a high risk group: young children, the elderly, already suffering from lung or heart ailments, or have severe symptoms such as high fever. The CDC recommends you stay home for 24 hours so you don't spread the thing around. People worry about being sneezed on, but the virus can live for hours in dried mucus. I've taken to using the paper towel that I wash my hands with to open the rest room door, fat lot of good that has done me.
     

     Up to 40 million Americans get the flu each year; what makes it so contagious is that the flu viruses constantly adapt. This year's strain is not the same as last year's, and you can have various types of flu being passed around at the same time.
     

     Because of the mutation, settling on a vaccine for the strain of flu that might be around is considered a "crap shoot." This year the doctors lost.
   

     You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
    

     I set the volume down on the phone and put it on speaker, making it more of a background, the gentle hum of anxiety that all medical situations bring. I avoid doctors and hospitals—half the time they get you sick there—and you usually get better whether treated or not.
   

     The hour mark—that seemed a decent period to abandon the quest—the sun was dazzling the frost on the window. I listened one more time to the friendly mantra.

   

      You have reached the Covenant Medical Group. All our lines are busy assisting other patients. Please hold on and your call will be answered promptly. Thank you.
     

    At least this column was about done. I wandered downstairs, figuring I should tell my wife before I hung up. My wife made a face, grabbed her cell phone, dialed the same number I had dialed an hour earlier. Someone answered immediately. My wife shot me a just-how-stupid-are-you glance, then handed me the phone. I'm seeing the doctor this afternoon. Better safe than sorry.

     Postscript: I didn't have the flu. 

The atrocity in Paris

Calligraphy by Stephanie Shapiro

     Journalists are very fortunate in this country. We can write what we please, without fear that somebody is going to come around and kill us. Some nasty remarks from disgruntled cops, some noxious posts by Right Wing haters, but nothing that can't be shaken off with a shiver, like a dog coming in from the rain.
     But the slaughter of 12 staffers of Charlie Hebdo, a French satiric newspaper, reminds us how precious that is, how threatened. How history is dominated by the brutal and the powerful crushing those who question or laugh at them. Or, in this case, the armed and the fanatical, trying to.
     You know why they do it. It's hard to be ridiculed. To have your most cherished beliefs held up for mockery. The intelligent person examines the scorn and satire directed his way, roots around in the mess for what kernels of truth may be, and tries to learn from those. None of us is perfect, no belief system without flaws.
     The fanatic doesn't have that option. When you can't examine your own beliefs, the only outlet is to attempt to silence those questioning you. Just a few days ago a Chicago cop started demanding online, in posts and tweets brandishing images of his badge, that I apologize for something I said about the police. I saw his efforts, shrugged, and thought, "I don't have to ask permission from the Chicago Police Department to say what I think, nor do I have to apologize to them when I do." What I said was true, and even if it weren't, that's what freedom is, a cacophony of voices, some respectful, some irreverent, some false, some true. In a democracy, we respect citizens enough to let them sort it out. Some of us do, anyway.  Some haven't gotten the memo, or refuse to read it, or have read it but can't quite grasp the concept. Free speech is great for them. For others, it's just blasphemy.
      A shame. Free speech makes you strong. It creates a world where ideas thrive because they work, not because those who would point out the flaws are beaten down. Fanatics who must gag opposing thoughts, inspired by their supposedly powerful faith, ironically have less faith, in themselves, in what they believe. Otherwise, why couldn't they trust their ideas to succeed on their own merits? Terrorist outrages like the one in France are, in essence, expressions of weakness, of doubt. My God—or at least God as I would envision Him—is a powerful God, not undercut by cartoons. You would think that would be an easy position for anyone of faith to embrace. Alas, it is not.
    The purpose of these crimes is to instill fear, the fear they already feel, terror of life, of otherness. We should react the opposite: by renewing our courage, our belief in the redemptive power and beauty of free speech. These terrorists do not represent a faith, they do not represent a philosophy. They are ragged stragglers fighting for a cause that has already lost, long ago.