Serve and protect ... themselves

     The truly disturbing thing about the photograph of two cops brandishing rifles and grinning over the prone body of a black man wearing antlers (wearing antlers — how do you even do that? "C'mere buddy, put these antlers on and let this third cop take your picture before we turn you loose?") is not that it jarringly captures one moment of grotesque bad judgment and racial insensitivity a dozen years ago, but that it is also a perfect expression of the main ongoing problem then, now and into the foreseeable future of the Chicago Police Department.

     The motto on Chicago squad cars, "We Serve and Protect," is a phrase without an object. "We serve and protect whom?" The implication is the people of the city of Chicago, and to be fair, much serving and protecting goes on, all the time, all day, every day. Any discussion of the Chicago Police has to start with a caveat: that there are over 12,000 sworn officers, most doing their jobs in a laudable fashion, enduring an at times dull, at times difficult routine, performing acts of heroism, sometimes laying down their lives.
     But the ooze from the bad apples spatters them, big time. The routine competence and occasional excellence of the department is undercut by a general atmosphere that could be emblazoned on their cars as "We serve and protect ourselves." The attitude is that their job is so dangerous that their first duty is to each other, and it fosters an insular world of corruption and cronyism. Every illegally parked car with a pair of handcuffs or a checkered hatband hanging from the rearview mirror is a whisper of "I'm a cop; give me a break."
     And they do, on matters big and small, and it leads to cops like Jerome Finnigan, on the left in the instantly infamous photo. Finnigan is in a prison in Florida serving 12 years for robbery and home invasion. The other officer, Timothy McDermott, is still trying to get his job back, and the public has to shake its head that the Police Board voted 5-4 to fire him last October.
     Really? A close call? McDermott argued it was a youthful prank, and to the degree that could be true, you have to feel sorry for him. But the Chicago Police Department has long been a weight on our city's reputation. Try to pick an era without a jaw-dropping police scandal, from this latest embarrassment rocketing around the Internet to Burge torture to the police riots of the 1960s. It never ends.
     At some point the police need to at least give the impression they care, that the best interests of any officer who does any misdeed imaginable and some that aren't won't trump what is in the best interests of the department and the city.
     Finnigan and the three officers working for him logged 200 complaints without raising any alarm among their superiors, and when you look at how one of those complaints was handled, you see why. In 2002, Finnigan and his fellow Chicago Police officers broke into the home of Robert Cook, who turned out to be a Chicago firefighter. They beat him in front of his children. Cook filed a complaint. Here is how the complaint was handled, according to Cook's lawsuit against the city:

     The next day, May 30, 2002, an investigator from the CPD came to plaintiff's home to discuss his complaint. The investigator told plaintiff that plaintiff was a drug dealer and that his complaint was "bogus." A day or two later, the investigator returned to plaintiff's house and told him that if he pursued his complaint the police would cause him to lose his job. Plaintiff told the investigator that he would not pursue the case so long as the police did not arrest him, plant drugs on him, or have him fired. As the investigator left plaintiff's home, he told plaintiff, "just forget about this; otherwise kiss your job goodbye, and you're f----."

     Over the past decade, the city of Chicago has paid out $500 million in lawsuits based on such police work. A half-billion dollars. That's almost exactly the nut due on the ballooning police pensions. If cops weren't so adept at ignoring the malfeasance of their brethren, Chicago wouldn't be quite so broke.
     Police have a tough job, which they make tougher by coddling the rotten apples among them. We haven't had a Ferguson-type crisis in Chicago yet out of pure dumb luck. But luck only holds so long, and the Chicago Police Department must start policing itself better.

Prize Possession

     The Sun-Times ran a story Wednesday —about physicist and former Fermi head Leon Lederman selling his Nobel Prize — that brought to mind one of my favorite stories I ever wrote, not so much for its execution, but for the idea sparking it. It was 1988, and the Small family had just started a new magazine called Chicago Times, and I wanted to impress them with my sense of quirk.  My first piece is below, on Nobel laureates, where they put their Nobel prizes when they get them home, and do they show them off to dinner guests. The original lede on this story was a non-sequitur —"Most people know that Albert Nobel invented dynamite, but few realize that his father invented plywood"—that appealed to me because I felt it set the proper surreal tone of focusing on a mundane aspect of the Nobel Prize (faithful reader Gry Haukland contributes this sublime item from Scientific American about trying to get your Nobel through airport security). But the editor rejected my beginning, so the story was printed the way it appears below, in September 1988, a few months before Lederman won his Nobel Prize in physics. Bidding for the medal starts at $325,000. As for my story, well, I hope it's worth the time it takes to read.

     On December 10, a new group of academics will be paraded, blinking, into the glare of global publicity in Stockholm, Sweden. There they will receive what may be the world's most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize, along with a payment of approximately $225,000.
     These laureates will be questioned about the discoveries and life work that led to their awards. But, if this year is like others, the really pertinent questions about the Nobel will go unasked. Where do the winners put the prizes when they get them home? And what do they do with the money?
     Luckily, the University of Chicago has produced fifty-five Nobel laureates, more than any other institution in the world. Consequently, answers are close at hand.
      "It's a lovely paperweight," George Stigler says of the beribboned two-inch-across, one-eighth-inch-thick solid gold medallion he received in 1982 for his work on economics and public information. "It's in my desk and I bring it out once in a while to amuse people."
     Stigler says he knows of one laureate who carries his Nobel Prize around, presenting the stamped profile of the inventor of dynamite at hotels, along with demands for discounts.
     Other laureates are more hesitant about displaying their prizes out of a combination of fear and modesty. 
     "The prize is usually in a safe-deposit box," says Jim Cronin, who, with Val Fitch, won it in 1980 for his work on subatomic particles called K-mesons. Cronin does have a facsimile prize close at hand, however.
     "What the foundation does, for a minimum charge, is give you a replica, a fake," he says. "It's sitting in the study with all the other memorabilia that I'm ashamed to show to anybody I respect. Maybe I'd like to, but I'm too embarrassed. But the children like to see it."
     Theodore W. Schultz, who received the prize in 1979 along with W. Arthur Lewis for pioneering work on economic transformation of traditional agricultural societies, found the idea of making a replica distasteful. He keeps his prize locked away in a special safe the Defense Department gave him to store classified documents. "I've not displayed it—once in a while my children may look at it, and that's about it," he says.
     As an economist, Schultz chides himself for holding on to the prize, which he calls "a gravestone that draws no interest. I could have sold it and drawn interest on it." But the man who was insightful enough to develop the idea of the importance of human capital recognizes that, in the grand scope of his personal finances, the interest off a Nobel Prize will not make or break him. "my marginal interest would have been quite low compared to knowing it's just there."     
     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the great astrophysicist who theorized the existence of black holes when he was nineteen and who won the prize in 1983, never thought about selling his Nobel. "What can one do?" he asks in a faint, philosophical tone. "You can melt it down for gold, or you can put it in a bank. I don't go to the extreme." Chandrasekhar did have a reproduction made, but then gave it away to his brothers in India.
     The "minimum charge" Cronin mentioned for the replica—other laureates estimated it was between $25 and $40—points out another interesting aspect to the award. "You'd be amazed," Cronin laughs. "They give you all this money, pay for your transportation and hotel, but if you want photographs—and they photograph the ceremony like crazy—they charge you $10 apiece."
     Cronin also dispels the myth that laureates use the prize money to "further their work." He says he used some of the money to put plumbing and a new porch on his cabin in Wisconsin. Stigler built a cabin in Canada. Schultz pointed out that travel expense to the ten days of festivities in Stockholm for twenty-nine family members "took a good hunk out of the prize." 
     And finally, for all the scientists working away in obscurity, dreaming of the day they will wow the academy in Stockholm with the scientific brilliance of their acceptance speech, Cronin offers a disillusioning revelation.
     "I put a lot of work into my speech," he says. "This was a social occasion, and my speech was a scientific paper—no jokes. It went over like a lead balloon." 
     

Can you spell 'labyrinthine?'

     The finals of the 88th Scripps National Spelling Bee are going on in Maryland over the next few days. One of those quaint bits of Americana that persists in the face of being utterly mooted by technology. Who needs to know how to spell? Tap out a jumble of letters somewhat close to the correct spelling and your phone will do the rest.
     Yet millions of kids dutifully study long lists of words, and jam themselves into the wide end of that funnel squirting out one lone champion (or, at best, like last year, two) this Friday.
     Why? That’s easy. It’s a way for children who otherwise might not find opportunities for acclaim to win big. Any kid who can run fast or pitch hard can find fleeting glory playing sports. But the ability to focus, to study hard, for years? Who honors that? You’ve got science fairs, chess tournaments and the spelling bee, and that’s about it.
     This year there is bee controversy. The Washington Post, which watches the bee more closely than most, since it finishes up in the newspaper’s backyard, spotlighted the domination of the bee by Indian-American kids, who have taken the championship seven years in a row.
     Which led to ugly social media condemnation last year. Co-champions Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe “were greeted with a barrage of racist comments on Facebook and Twitter,” the Post reported, citing examples such as, “The kids in the spelling bee should only be AMERICAN.”
     Like the Post, I have a particular interest in the bee. In 1993, I was writing a book on failure, and thought it should include something related to public school — that’s where much of our fear of failure comes from, the red F, all those nightmares where you’re taking a test you haven’t studied for. But what to actually report on? A student failing a class? A girl who didn’t make the cheerleading squad? That seemed so bleak. And then I remembered the National Spelling Bee. It was perfect. Nine million kids enter. They all lose, in a public, humiliating way that gets more public and more humiliating as it goes along. And it’s spelling, it’s stupid, it’s not even a valuable skill.
       So I decided I would follow a student through a year of the bee, through local, regional, state and national bees.
     But how to find one student in the Chicago area with a chance of going to the nationals?
     I formed a strategy: hedge your bets. Those who go to the national round are often those who went to the nationals in the past. So I would observe a past state winner who would have a better chance to go back for another go. The two previous winners from Illinois were kids named Gary Lee and Sruti Nadimpalli. My reporter’s instinct told me it would be far easier to find the latter, and I did. She was 12 then, a serious girl, the child of two doctors. I followed her through her bees at the school, regional and state levels. She didn’t go to nationals, but I did, and found a brutal competition. The chapter in my book was called, “Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys,” the way a Scripps flack described the weeping losers.
     Twenty-two years is a long time, but again, thanks to her distinctive name, I found Sruti in about 10 seconds, a doctor herself now, teaching at the Stanford University School of Medicine. I asked her how she views the bee, from the perspective of an adult in her mid-30s.
     “I think studying spelling fosters a love of language in many of the participants, the preparation is intense, and rote, and — depending on one’s parents’ approach — can be a bit much,” she wrote in an email. “In this age as well, I don’t think good spelling carries the value it used to. That said, I probably wouldn’t have opted out of participating if I could do it over again.”
     Her mention of parents made me realize something. A lot of these kids are in the bee because their folks push them. Which puts an extra cruel spin on the abuse of winners. Their ambitious, often new immigrant parents force them to participate in this surreal struggle where, after years of effort, should by some fluke they emerge victorious, then the children of parents who let them spend their youths playing Xbox await to heckle them online. That isn’t right.

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.