Will my air bag kill me?

The author with his 1963 Volvo P1800, 1984.

    Once I drove a car without brakes. Intentionally. It was my first car: a 1963 Volvo P1800, the Swedish idea of a sports car with stubby fins, white in color, just like The Saint’s. The brakes quit abruptly. Push the pedal to the floor and nothing happened. But I could still downshift and had the emergency brake, so I drove it home. I was 22 and stupid, if that isn’t being redundant.
     But I got away with it.
     Now, 32 years later, the same guy who climbed behind the wheel of that brakeless Volvo contemplates the burgeoning Takata air bag recall. I’ve been manfully ignoring it, but like the radioactive blob in one of those 1950s horror movies it keeps getting bigger. Last week the recall doubled to 34 million cars, the biggest recall in automotive history.
     The air bags, which are supposed to save you in an accident — a nice touch of irony — instead can spray metal shrapnel into your face, even after a minor fender bender. Six people have died. A hundred more have been injured, some with gruesome facial injuries. Nothing like someone having their throat cut by an air bag or a shard of steel jammed in their eye to catch public attention.

The 2005 Honda Odyssey on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

       This has been gathering for years. Now seems the moment when even the most complacent driver looks up from his silage, utters a worried “moo,” and goes shuffling off to find out whether his silver bean of a 2005 Honda Odyssey is among those now being recalled. The van that my darling boys and precious wife drive.
     The government has a website — safercar.gov — good old government, catching business when it falls in a swoon. Easy to find. And look, a big yellow button marked “Search for recall by VIN.”
     Trot out to the driveway, open the driver’s side door. The expected big white sticker. Fall to my knees. Squint at the tiny type: “MFD. BY HONDA MFG. OF ALABAMA.” Of course, Made in America. I can’t even work into a towering “Remember Pearl Harbor” sense of betrayal. “THIS VEHICLE CONFORMS TO ALL APPLICABLE FEDERAL MOTOR VEHICLE SAFETY AND THEFT PREVENTION STANDARDS IN EFFECT ON THE DATE OF MANUFACTURE.”
     Ha! All the good THAT did! Too bad Congress didn’t pass the “Don’t Bungle Producing The Air Bags So Badly That They Start Killing People Act of 2005.” All of this might have been avoided.
     There, the VIN, a blindness inducing jumble. “5″ or is that an “S”? “FNRL38″ or is that a “B”? And so on. Seventeen digits.
     Back to the computer, plug ‘em in.
     “Number of Open Recalls: 0.”
     Hooray, right? Wrong. Thanks to the orange box reading “Please Note: If you are checking to see if your vehicle is affected by the Takata air bag recalls, it generally takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks for automakers to gather individual VINs associated with a recall. It is important that you check back periodically as a recall on your vehicle may not show up immediately.”
     Oh. It is important, is it? Another important task that may or may not help keep me in some infinitesimal way.
     So do you drive the car and try not to think about it? Or what? Walk? Wear a hockey mask? Buy a new car? A new car that might also have some defective part you’ll find out about in a decade.
     Sigh. Keep driving. Try … not … to … think … about … it.
     Earlier this month, Malcolm Gladwell published a lengthy article in the New Yorker on the safety of the Ford Pinto, which my generation knows as the pinup for unsafe cars — they burst into flames if you rear-ended them. Only, as Gladwell demonstrates, they didn’t, at least not any more than any other of the cars at the time. “In 1975-76, 1.9 percent of all cars on the road were Pintos,” Gladwell writes, “and Pintos were involved in 1.9 percent of all fatal fires.”
     Whoops. Turns out the Pinto wasn’t more dangerous than any other lousy mid-1970s car.
     You know what is the most dangerous part of any car, don’t you? What causes tens of thousands of deaths every year?
     The driver.
     But we can’t recall those, can we? So instead we fixate on these one-in-a-million risks — which are a big deal if you or your loved one is that one unlucky driver out of a million. For the rest of us, it’s all just part of the endless, confusing, scary hassle that is modern life. Drive safely. If you can.

Flanders is in Belgium, for one.

Purple poppies at the Chicago Botanic Garden, May 22, 2015. 

     We went shopping Saturday. It was a tiny bit chilly, so my wife put on her light black jacket.
      "I bought a poppy," my wife said, fingering a small red paper flower at her collar. "They were selling them downtown."
     I nodded.
     "It's ironic," she continued, "that they'd sell poppies to benefit vets, considering the drug problem."
      Poppies are made into heroin. 
      I paused.  It's bad enough to be pedantic—to be always dredging up minutia to afflict your friends and loved ones with. But worse to be a repeat offender. I tiptoed gingerly.
      "There's a reason they use poppies," I said. "I may have told you."
      "Maybe you did," she said. "But I don't recall."
      That was encouragement enough, for me.
     "There is an cemetery in Flanders ... in France," I continued. "Where thousands of American servicemen are buried. After World War I, someone wrote a poem."
      "In Flanders field, the poppies grow, upon the crosses, row on row...." I began. But that was as much as I remembered. Back at home, I checked. 
      As blowhards often do, I had a few key details wrong. The poem wasn't written after the war, but in May, 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, by a Canadian military doctor and artillery commander, Major John McCrae. And Flanders isn't in France; it's in Belgium. 
       Details now, I suppose. It's a short, powerful poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. 

Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

     A lot to think about. What does it mean to "break faith" with the dead? To forget them, perhaps? And who is the foe? A century ago, it was the Germans. Now...not as easy.  Those last two lines are certainly a lie: I don't believe the military dead rest lightly or uneasily depending on the diligence of our military policy.  Perhaps he meant we have a responsibility to them, to act in a better fashion than we usually seem inclined to. 
      We forget the past without frequent reminders. So Memorial Day is important, to reflect on all the soldiers who fell trying to keep our country free, and remember the responsibility that we as free citizens have to sort through it all, and to remember, and to elect leaders who won't squander the precious gift that service men and women so willingly gave, and give.

        

Dante turns 750

   

     We don't know exactly when Dante Alighieri was born. June 1, 1265 is the commonly given date, but scholars say late May, early June. Around now.

     Like countless others, I have an enduring admiration and interest in Dante. I was reading Justin Steinberg's "Dante and the Limits of the Law" and thought, "Retirement won't be so bad; I'll just read books about Dante and the years will roll by."

     It's a hard fixation to explain; you kinda have to be there. But I gave it a go five years ago, ironically, when an Inferno video game came out.

     Offense is the grease that keeps us spinning. Someone says something that clashes with your values, and you register your displeasure by complaining, flexing the newfound power you believe being a victim gives you.
     There is another way. Your cherished beliefs being mangled can also be a "teachable moment." Take a TV commercial running during Sunday's Super Bowl -- no, not the pro-life ad. I mean the 30-second spot for EA's new video game, "Dante's Inferno."
      Ahem. Yes, liberties were taken with the 700-year-old poem. The character of Dante —his gaunt visage, scowling as if he had actually seen the souls in hell — is rendered into your basic, bland, buff superhero, mowing down demons with a scythe. His great love, Beatrice, is no demure Florentine lady, but a sultry blond bimbo in a white strap dress who looks like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader on date night.
     My reaction—the reaction of anyone who loves Dante and pauses first to think—is "Hooray!" Thanks, EA. How many people were introduced to great art through what were once called "low culture"—comic books and cartoons and games? How many first heard opera on "Bugs Bunny"? Or cut their literary teeth on "Classics Illustrated" comics? I did.
     So welcome, thumb-twiddling teens. I won't pretend many of you will shift from the video game to the 100-canto poem. But some will. They've reissued Longfellow's translation of the Inferno with a video game cover, and it's doing far better on Amazon than previous editions. A few kids will wonder what the real thing is about. It's simple.

DANTE IN 666 WORDS

     Many facts are known about Dante Alighieri—as opposed to his only equal in literature, William Shakespeare, about whose life we know almost nothing for certain.
     Two facts about Dante are particularly important: 1) At age 9, he saw Beatrice Portinari, 8, in the street and fell madly in unrequited love. 2) In adulthood, Dante, accused of the unpoetic (but rather Cook County-ish) crime of skimming funds intended for municipal road repairs, was exiled from Florence.
     In exile, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, a poem divided into three major sections: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.
     The Inferno is the most fun, since souls suffering endless torment in hell are a lot more interesting than souls humbly ascending purgatory's mountain or souls whirling around the complex golden landscape of heaven.
     The plot is outlined in the famous first sentence: "Midway through our life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark wood. . . ." Dante wanders into hell, where he meets the Roman poet Virgil, there at Beatrice's request to guide Dante to her in heaven. They take the long route.
      The two emotions that drive the Inferno are love and revenge. Dante's hell is a meticulously crafted vengeance upon everyone who did him wrong, populated with real Florentine political figures. "Come get Filippo Argenti!" filth-spattered souls cry "crazed with rage" as they mangle Dante's enemy.
     The love in the Inferno is not so much for Beatrice — that comes later — as for his lost Florence in general and for a certain Florentine in particular: Dante himself.
     The Inferno is the first modern piece of fiction (it's so vivid, you have to remind yourself that he's making all this up; our concept of hell today, with pitchfork-wielding demons and lakes of fire, is all Dante). Modernism is about the rise of the individual, and Dante is not writing about heroes or gods, but himself. He's the hero, and his participation in the story is stunningly contemporary—as many plays as Shakespeare wrote, no character named Will Shakespeare ever shows up on stage and talks about how great he is. Dante does that. He brags like a rap star.
     Dante also wrote in Italian, something new at the time. Thus the Inferno has to be translated every generation to keep it fresh -- it's a shame the kids are being served stale Longfellow because Robert Pinsky's 1994 translation is much better.
     Compare Longfellow in the 9th Circle: "Then I beheld a thousand faces, made/Purple with cold; whence o'er me comes a shudder/And evermore will come, at frozen ponds" to Pinsky: "I saw a thousand faces after that/All purple as a dog's lips from the frost/I still shiver, and always will, at the sight."

POETS ON COMPUTERS

     I couldn't resist checking in with Pinsky, the former poet laureate of the United States, to learn his take on this newest interpretation of Dante.
     "I love games (and Dante)," he e-mailed back. "And when a publication, in advance, asked me to go online to play this one, I tried, with an open and maybe even receptive mind. But after a while I noticed that I was having trouble staying awake." He found the game "tired, cornball and dull."
     Not something that could be said about the Inferno. To enjoy it, keep Dante's life in mind, the relentless way he goes after his foes (unable to put Pope Boniface VIII in hell, since he had not yet died by Easter 1300, when the tale takes place, Dante pauses to admire the hole waiting for Boniface as soon as he arrives).
     "Bitter is the taste of another man's bread," Dante writes, "and weary the way up and down another man's stairs." You remember that this is a disappointed, middle-age exile who didn't get the girl and never got to return home. A message that won't resonate with many teens. But as the years go by, it might, and that gaudy video game edition will still be on their shelves, ready when they need it.

     -- Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 7, 2010

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     As proud as I am of being Jewish, I gotta say. Catholics have us beat, architecturally. For all sorts of legitimate socio-historical reasons. Synagogues invariably look like some weird modern spaceship structure built in Belgium—I guess because all the cool old urban dome synagogues were abandoned by their congregations fleeing to the suburbs, and became churches. 
    I hope that doesn't make me a self-hating Jew, to acknowledge factuality like that. I'm not saying there aren't any pretty synagogues anywhere. I've been to some beauts, particularly overseas—in Rome, in London, in Barbados, of all places. But in Chicago? Well, not so much.  
    Anyway, I encountered this brick beauty...ah...while on my peregrinations around the city Friday, and had to stop and snap a few photographs. 
     Recognize it? Where was I? The first to ID the church wins one of my okay-I-admit-it-I'm-stuck-with-them blog posters. Place your guesses below. Good luck. Have fun. 

Starting to win the war on drugs

     It was always crazy that you could buy a gallon of vodka at any grocery store, while a joint would land you in a jail.
     But “crazy” is one of the more apt adjectives describing America’s War on Drugs, a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar effort that in the end . . . assuming this is, please God, the beginning of the end . . . produced what? Plentiful, ever cheaper street narcotics and a prison system jammed with drug offenders.
     More than half of the inmates in the federal prison system are there for drug offenses. As are nearly a quarter of those in state prisons.
     True, most are there for hard drugs, which is an actual social problem. About 12 percent of prisoners in the state and federal systems are there for selling marijuana. That’s still more than 100,000 people, all for involvement with a drug that has killed … well, nobody ever.
     On Thursday, the Illinois Senate took another baby step toward sanity by decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana. Sure, pot isn’t healthy, and not a very productive use of your time. But if mind-numbing time wastes were crimes, then a whole lot of folks would be in Stateville on an Xbox rap.
     It’s uncertain whether Gov. Bruce Rauner will sign the bill, though as a guy already lashing out at the unions and at Chicago, he might decide to go with the flow, for once, and approve of a popular measure. Americans are tired of this war.
     Anyone concerned about a nation in gridlock — and any patriotic American should fear that more than the Russians and ISIS put together — has to cheer this development, as nearly half the states, including Illinois, have legalized marijuana in some form. Even people who never smoke pot — i.e. me — have to welcome the reduced waste of police and judicial resources, the money saved, the eventual tax bonanza gained, should we follow Colorado, Oregon and Washington State and allow recreational uses.
     There are two ways to view this. It could be seen as a victory for drug culture, for those who want a bit of impairment to help their lives slide by. Or it could be seen as a victory for good government, for allowing American citizens their supposed liberty to do as they please, to indulge in a recreation that harms no one. Maybe we’re at along last starting to win the war, but not in the way we had planned. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Photo atop blog: Venice Beach, California, 2009

Stealing their souls

    The place, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The time, last February. The museum consists of a number of various buildings and courtyards and, coming out of one, we encountered this installation of yellow plastic string— Jesus Rafael Soto's 1990 "Penetrable"—with children happily scampering through it. It seemed a picture. I whipped out my cell phone.
     "That's creepy," my teenage son said.
     "It's creepy to take photos of other people's children," my wife agreed.
    I was taken aback, surprised, indignant. Yes, I knew where they were coming from—fear of perverts—but didn't agree that this was an intrusion.
    I gestured to proud parents, standing around, also snapping pictures, one assumed of their kids, who were supposed to play in the thing (One critic called it "part geometric abstraction, part day care.")
    "Nobody knows that I'm not the parent of one of these kids," I said.
    Or, now that I think of it, the grandparent.
    It was a sour moment, that left a bad taste in my mouth for an hour, one that came back to me when reading about an incident earlier this month in Australia. A man took a selfie in front of a Darth Vader poster at a mall, and said some benign comment to a group of nearby kids, waiting to take a picture as well, something along the lines of, "I'll be done in a minute." Their mother caught the exchange but not what was said, instantly decided her children were being approached by a would-be molester, snapped his picture, and posted it online identifying him as "a creep." The post was shared thousands of times, the man's complete innocence established, and soon the mom was getting death threats and issuing "a groveling apology" through the Daily Mail.
      Fear spreads instantly but rationality takes its time. Being kidnapped by strangers is a risk, but a minute one. Far greater is the risk of overprotective parents warping their children'a lives by living in a state of constant fear, or blaming innocent persons doing unobjectionable things. I don't consider the above an inappropriate picture, nor the taking it, in a courtyard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an act of questionable judgment. Or was it?
   

Rahm's zenith of cynicism

     A buddy of mine had Rahm Emanuel's private cellphone number and dialed it by mistake, which he discovered when the mayor's voice barked, "I'm with my family!" from his back pocket.
     When I heard that story, I did not think, "Poor Mayor Emanuel, interrupted while on the floor playing Monopoly with the kids." What I thought is that family is the club he pulls out automatically when fending off the prying gaze of the media, the fire ax behind the glass. A trick he learned from Mayor Daley: Put Maggie in a magic garden with unicorns and bristle indignantly whenever anyone looks over the rose hedge and asks, say, about the fat salaries she draws sitting on corporate boards. How dare you! That's my family!
     But family isn't always of practical use in every occasion, and so other families, particularly other families' kids, are a surrogate, and the mayor uses them continually as the perfect human shield to duck behind for political cover. Emanuel's second inauguration speech Monday continued the trend, evoking, to me, Karen Lewis' classic assessment: "Rahm thinks you're stupid." Not me, personally, though I'm sure he does. But people in general. You'd have to consider the intelligence of the city pretty low to, at a moment of true civic financial crisis, look to the clouds and wax poetic about the intractable problems of urban poverty and Our Young.
     "I want to use this moment to shine a spotlight on preventing another lost generation of our city’s youth."
     He didn't address kids who'll be lost because their schizophrenic parents can't go to the mental health clinics that the city closed, who suffer living in an economically collapsing city, or the disabled kids who've had their support kicked out from under them by his buddy Bruce Rauner in the name of making Illinois a more hospitable place to run businesses
     Rather, he told us that every child holds "the spark of the divine."
     Well thanks for the big reveal, Mr. Mayor, because some weekends it seems like they're the cast of a zombie shooter video game.
     Like "the most American of American cities" line he keeps repeating, Emanuel said a lot that sounds good but falls apart upon examination. "They may have been born in poverty, but poverty was not born in them." Nice chiasmus, your Honor, but what does that even mean?
     I half expected Rahm to trot out a kindergarten class, right there on stage at the Chicago Theatre, and start reading them "Hop on Pop." Delivered by another politician, the inauguration speech would be an unobjectionable effort. But coming from our mayor it is the zenith of cynicism, his standard schtick, children being the shiny watch he hopes to dangle in front of the electorate and the media hoping to mesmerize them.
     This time it was an epic fail. The front-page stories in both Chicago dailies presented schizophrenic coverage of the inauguration, alternating between the mayor's empty city-on-a-hill bromides and the looming economic disaster that he barely mentioned.
     Inaugurations are superfluous. The law doesn't require the mayor to be sworn in. His new term would have begun anyway at noon, with or without the Festiva del Rahm. Compare his one-size-fits-all speech to how powerful it would have been had he said, "You know, we're in a crisis, so rather than throw myself another bar mitzvah party, I'm asking that the money go to fund an after-school program in Roseland." That would have been something to applaud.
     Instead, we got endangered kids and how "we must make them ever present in our conversation."
    Oh, we're going to talk poverty away. Who knew it was that easy? Was there a specific thing in there that the mayor said he'd actually do? Good programs we're already doing, and the importance of parenting and mentoring. The usual suspects.
     The speech left me with this question: If talking about disadvantaged youth puts them on the road to solving their problems, in the mayor's mind if not in hard actuality, then what does not talking about a problem, say the city's finances, mean? That we're nowhere? Exactly. Which is why the mayor isn't talking about it. Maybe it's about time he does. Put down "Hop on Pop." Pick up Crain's. And start talking about the elephant that is not just in the room but in the room standing on the city's neck.