Saturday, June 6, 2015

Abusers deputize us to expand the ring of harm

 


     When the Saturday Fun Activity gets solved early—as it inevitably does—I feel like the readers are being cheated. So here is something extra, a piece I wrote for the Sun-Times national network yesterday that never got used, as far as I can tell. There isn't much to say about the Hastert scandal that isn't obvious, but I didn't hear anybody exploring this point, so I thought I would give it a try.

     Dennis Hastert didn’t just damage his victims—allegedly—the boys he is accused of molesting as a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School. 
     There are more, others who are harmed as well. 
     No, I’m not referring to the reputation of Congress—no allegations necessary, here. Hastert has without question done that, years ago, through his shady land deals and ignoring the 2006 page scandal, we now suspect, because he secretly had a dog in that race.
     The Justice Department charged him with financial misdealings, trying to cover up some undefined past sins. But Hastert’s abuse—which, it must be said, even as he is condemned by general acclamation, has not been officially alleged, never mind proven—will certainly feed a bias that never gets articulated, yet is there.
    I’m reluctant to articulate it now.
    But it is a common one, that we usually don't think about, even though, in essence, we're helping spread the damage of abuse, in a low level sense.
    So here goes:
    For harried working guys, trying to scrape together a buck, who can’t imagine volunteering to coach teams and lead programs, for busy dads, overwhelmed just trying to take care of their own biological children, never mind anybody else's, there are baseless allegations of the mind, a squint, applied to coaches, scout masters, club advisors, church youth group leaders, and men of that ilk. You wonder: why do they do it? What’s in it for them? You wonder if, perhaps, something’s wrong with them. You might trust them, eventually, when you get to know them. That’s what usually happens.
     But you sure don’t trust them at first.
    That might be prudent, but it sure isn’t fair, I’ll say immediately. If more than a small percentage of wrestling coaches like Hastert was were also child molesters, we’d know about it.
     Wouldn’t we?
     But life isn’t fair, and the responsible parent, handing his child over to that middle-aged man in a khaki uniform, scrutinizing the debate coach who’s going to drive the team to another city for the night, has to wonder.  And worry. That's part of being a parent.
    Suspicion can be good, protective. I remember hovering outside of my home office, listening, while my son’s chess tutor put him through his paces. He was a Russian, and he slapped those pieces hard down on my fancy chessboard, which made me wince, a little, but not enter the room. That wasn’t what I was listening for.
     This nagging suspicion gets a little stronger with every new Dennis Hastert flushed blinking and shamed into the spotlight. And that vast majority of good, decent self-sacrificing coaches, scoutmasters, church youth group leaders and teachers of every stripe have another straw of doubt, of guilt by association placed upon their backs.  Their tough jobs get just a little bit tougher.
     Life isn’t fair, as I said. But it’s more unfair to some than others.  Each perpetrator of abuse leaves behind many victims. The vast majority he never meets. Instead, we do. We are unconsciously deputized by depravity, and act as the abusers' proxies, inflicting the corrosive damage of unspoken accusations in tiny, unmeasured doses to those whose only crime is trying to make the world a better place and our children better people.  We might want to think about that.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?


     I am not, as a rule, a fan of modern, non-representational art.
     Especially public sculpture.
     And I'm not exactly a fan of this pair of pyramids interrupted with a ... sort of an aqua skeletal ball.
     But it stopped me enough to look at it. And I guess I could say I disliked it less than I usually dislike a thing like this. It had a certain suddenness I appreciated. 
      Or maybe I was just glad for a suitable Saturday mystery photo. A bit off the beaten track, as it were. At least my beaten track. You might walk by it every day.
      Anyway, the question is not its aesthetic value or lack of same, but where in Chicago it is located. Do you know? Have you any idea? If so, place your guess below. The winner will receive one of my high quality 2015 blog posters.

Friday, June 5, 2015

The CTA cuts through the clutter


  
      My older teen is a fusspot, who occasionally corrects my language — "Father, it's not who am I talking to?" he'll archly announce, "but to whom am I talking?"
     I suppress the natural fatherly response — "Shut up you" — and say, "I'm allowed to use the vernacular," i.e., our own native language, the way normal people normally speak.
     This was a hard-won right. Once the elites spoke in French; prayers were in Latin. Common folk were low peasants, and expected to be ashamed of their low peasant ways.
     That changed, thank you democracy, thank you mass media, thank you the general falling away of pious dogma and pointless rules.
     When I saw the CTA courtesy poster headlined, "Your maid doesn't work here," and beginning, "Please don't leave your crap behind," my first, unfiltered thought was, "Good for you, CTA." A slightly salty word, a bit of vernacular that might actually cut through the clutter and lodge itself into the mind of the rider, far better than the expected "Please don't leave your litter or personal effects behind."
     Public transit exortations almost demand a little attitude to work. New York, which invented saucy signs ("Don't even THINK of parking here") started a courtesy campaign last year on its trains that suggests its riders are strippers: “Pole Are For Your Safety, Not Your Latest Routine."
      To be honest, I considered remarking on the CTA's moment of courage, but then decided that I'm too biased. I swear like a sailor. I'm the guy whose personal blog is called "Every goddamn day," accepting that for every 50 readers who laugh at the title, there will be one person squirming. Sorry, squirming person. I think the rules keeping obscenity out of newspapers and network TV are dumb. I think the "n-word" locution is an insult to African-Americans, suggesting they'll collapse in a swoon confronted with raw history. I conform through gritted teeth, unwilling.
     Maybe a few are comforted by such niceties. But those few always try to run the show.  Rather than change their expectations, they want to force everybody to harmonize with whatever little girl's ballerina music box they've got tinkling away in the back of their minds.
     For instance, Lara Weber, a member of the Tribune editorial board, in a recent op-ed piece, chides the CTA for using its piquant word. She's too clever to do so in classic, ruffled Margaret Dumont style, quickly admitting that her qualms are more a reflection on herself and her upbringing. Still, she upbraids the CTA, anyway, because her mother didn't use the word.
     "Jeez Louise, are we really using 'crap' on official printed signs now?" she asks.
     Umm, yes, we are. And the president isn't wearing a necktie at some official functions, which would have left people a generation ago aghast.
     And — spoiler alert — Napoleon escaped from Elba. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you.
     Yes, a writer wants to keep certain words in reserve. Notice that "Jeez" at the beginning of Weber's cri de coeur. A euphemism for "Jesus," and, in this situation, an apt one. You want to reserve "Jesus," not to shield delicate reader sentiment, but for times when its verbal power is required. "Jesus, I am dying..."
     I'm tempted to chide the Tribune for being Ms. Grundy, again, the same publication that for decades tried to force simplified spelling down the throats of its readers — "thru" and "dropt" and "cigaret" — in the self-absorbed Teddy Roosevelt-esque notion that they knew better than their readers, and to bear the white man's burden of tidying up the language of Shakespeare.
     But the Tribune can be saucy, historically; it is the same publication that once emblazoned the word "C*NT" — the asterisk is theirs — across the front of its women's section, in a story of how that British cuss word for female anatomy was enjoying a certain vogue. They lost their nerve at the last moment and pulled the section. But we across the street got a copy that wasn't destroyed, and admired the ginger inspiring some ghost in the machine to even make the attempt. 
     Writers fail continually through excessive caution; they should try to fail more on the side of boldness. Someone is going to be offended by almost anything you write, if you do it correctly; the key is to hold their interest while using the right word in the right place. The garbage that careless riders leave behind on the bus is "crap," and the CTA should be lauded for taking a risk in trying to get rid of it.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

We never were Mayberry


     Had you asked me, even a few years ago, whether transgender Americans would be able to scoot through the door of acceptability that had been pried open by gay and lesbians, I'd have replied, 'Probably not.'
     It was asking too much, too broad of a stretch for the only recently limbered muscle of tolerance for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack. They feel the need to loathe somebody, and with gays and lesbians suddenly freed from the penalty box and making themselves comfortable on the home team bench, then an even tinier minority, whose lifestyle is even more unfamiliar, the men becoming women, women becoming men, would have to be pressed into service as the Despised Other.
     If anything, I'd have guessed their lot would become even worse, as they moved from near-complete obscurity to drawing the attention of a public already being forced to tolerate more than is their habit.
     But it happened; it is happening, right now.
     There is Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, that icon of manliness, on the cover of Vanity Fair, in an Annie Leibowitz fashion shot, now the woman she has long considered herself to be. And the reaction is ... a kind of awe. Acknowledgement of the courage to make that leap, to be true to your inner self, wherever that self leads you. To accept the consequences. It was a trust drop into society's arms and, amazingly, society caught her.
     "Fans and family alike came out in droves to support her transition," noted People magazine, in an item castigating former child star Drake Bell for tweeting "Sorry ... still calling you Bruce."
     How did this happen?
     The explanation, I believe, is this: the progress of gays and lesbians is usually seen in terms of what the change did for them—allowed them, first, to keep their jobs, then to see their relationships respected, first in the marriage columns of newspapers and then by law and, it seems someday soon, even in bakeries in Kansas.
     But what did this dramatic adjustment do, not just for gays, but for the society making the change? I would suggest that it drew attention to the tragic and pointless oppression of certain people for being who they are. That lives were constrained and destroyed trying to maintain a template of uniformity that isn't found in nature. We were never Mayberry. We were never all like the Cleavers, and those who strayed from the Ward and June Cleaver ideal actually have the right to live their lives, too.
     It helps that transgendered people were often manifesting themselves as very young children, and society is faced with the choice of repressing and abusing these little kids because of who they feel themselves to be—society's answer up to now—or letting those kids be the people they are determined to become.
     It's astounding progress. Who knew, when we were telling kids to go for their dreams, that we'd really mean it? People are always saying there is no good news, but this is good news. It's as if combatants fighting a long, bloody, pointless war suddenly looked at each other, saw their shared humanity, and just stopped fighting.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

U.S. Ranger goes to bat for Israel

Brian Mast

     People react to abuse in different ways.
     Some ignore it. Some get mad.
     And then there's Brian Mast's way.
    He is a vet, a decorated U.S. Army Ranger from Florida, a double amputee after stepping on a mine in Afghanistan in 2010.
      Back in civilian life, Mast decided to snag one honor that had eluded him—a college diploma—so took his wife and kids to Harvard University, where he's studying economics.
     There he discovered a new battle.
     As with so many campus in the United States, undergraduates at Harvard, in their undergraduate hunger to abolish the injustices of the world, throw themselves vigorously into ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through sheer public outcry, casting the complex, half-century old tragedy into a set piece Victorian melodrama with a mustache-twiddling villain, the Israelis, and a Little Nell victim, the Palestinians.
     "Being up in Boston, no question there is a lot of anti-Israel sentiment, and protests going on around Harvard," said Mast, who stumbled upon one last year while walking with his family on Boston Commons.
     "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that I'm a service member, with my Army Ranger cap and my two artificial legs," he said. "These four or five guys start saying things to me and my family. A little girl could push me over, but this is a fight I'm perfectly willing to have. I was inviting them to take me up, but in the end they left me and my family alone."
     That was not the end, however. For Mast, it was a beginning.
     "It was a very important reminder to me," said Mast. "I don't know why certain battles find their way into my life, but this is how fighting for Israel found its way into my life. This kind of torment goes on in Israel's neighborhood daily: Syria. Jordan. Iran. Egypt, doing this, day after day. It's a sign to me I need to stand up and show my support. This battle has come to me. I don't want to turn my back."
     Over the Christmas holidays, Mast went to Israel as a volunteer.
     "I couldn't have received a warmer reception," he said. "It was amazing."
     Spending time in Israel cemented his feelings for the country.
     "As I was over there, volunteering with immigrants, orphans, refugees from Sudan and Ethiopia, what struck me is these individuals skip over countries like Egypt to get into Israel, a country constantly under threat of attack. There must be a very good reason to skip over those countries, and it's the same reason immigrants from places like Guatemala and El Salvador skip over countries like Mexico to get into the United States, because the same freedom and opportunity offered here."
     I pointed out that a lot of American Jews -- myself included --have ambivalent feelings about Israel. While we don't embrace the "Give us your country" hallucinatory rhetoric of the Palestinians, we can't ignore the fact that they are indeed there, four million of them, living constricted lives, and that the hard liners and settlers aren't helping.
Mast  could understand how pro-Israel college students yield the field to Palestinian protests.
     "You're facing a mob mentality, not just mob mentality from individuals, but from the people who are supposed to be your educators. It can be extremely difficult thing to face," he said. "It's a little bit different for me. I'm a 34 year old man. I spent a good amount of time being in combat. I have that advantage. I had the life experience that nobody is going to tell me what to think."
     Mast is not ambivalent.
     "The anti-Israel protests, I just thought, 'It's completely wrong,' I literally didn't get how any American citizens were protesting Israel defending itself,," he said. "As I see this, year after year, the Palestinians fire rockets at Israel and then go hide behind the civilian population and cry the sky is falling when Israel defends itself.   It's this stupid game and it boggles me this double standard being applied."
     Back in the states, he now speaks on behalf of Israel--he was in town last week speaking at the Chicago chapter of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces annual dinner. 
     He was surprised to hear from his fellow vets.
     "Tons of my peers, fellow wounded warriors, saying, 'What are you doing in Israel? How did you get there? Can I do something similar to this?'" He said he is putting together a group of 10 to 12 fellow vets to go back and do it again.
    Mast is working for the federal government, advising Homeland Security on explosives, a job he had in the Army. As a federal employee, because of the Hatch Act, he can't say he's running for Congress in Florida's 18th Congressional district until that employment ends.     
     Which it does on Saturday. So his ability to help Israel might only grow.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Former classmate teaches lesson in compassion

   
      One of the downsides of feeding the Internet Beast is that it places a very high, almost exclusive, priority on facile riffing about whatever the web's fixation of the second is, and a low value on going out and learning about ordinary situations in the living world, which is the fun part of being a journalist. That's why I was so excited to start to write for Mosaic, the London web site of science and health run by the Wellcome Trust, a large British charity. Earlier this year, I spent a few weeks, off and on, at the University of Illinois' Craniofacial Center, researching an article on facial disfigurement that will go up on the website, and here on my blog (and, possibly, in the Sun-Times) on June 13.
     One of the great things about Mosaic is they run all sorts of additional links, videos and enhancements with their stories, and my editor there asked if this column, which I refer to in the Mosaic article, a look at how society views the disfigured and what their lives are like, were available online. I said it wasn't, but I could post it here. 
     So here is a 1998 column that shows how long I've been interested in this topic. When the story goes up, I'll probably strip off this little explanatory text out, so as not to confuse international readers arriving from the Mosaic site, and merely say:
     This is the original Sun-Times column mentioned in Neil Steinberg's June 13 Mosaic story on the disfigured and society.

     When I went to elementary school, there was a girl in my class named Cynthia Cowles, who had a deformed face. Her nose was smashed in, her eyes set far too wide apart.
     She had many operations. The doctors would try to reconfigure her face to something approaching normal. She would disappear from school for a while, then return, freshly scarred. This went on for years.
     She went through her ordeal with, as I recall, no support whatsoever from her classmates. Just the opposite. Kids are generally beastly, and we were free to be as beastly as we wanted to Cynthia Cowles, unencumbered by a shred of guilt or shame or remorse. Her deformity put her beyond the pale of sympathy.
     I can't remember any specific unkindness. Tormentors tend to be forgetful. In fact, I didn't even recall that I was the ringleader, instigating the teasing of Cynthia Cowles, until I called my mother to ask her about it. She recalled that Cynthia Cowles' mother called her, when I was in first grade, and asked her to do what she could to control me. But that was difficult to do.
     "I felt helpless," my mother said. "The things you were upset about, you'd open your mouth about."
     Truth was, I was terrified of deformity. That's why I gave Cynthia Cowles such a hard time. I was so uneasy with deformity that I was on guard just flipping through the c's in the dictionary, because I knew under "contortionist" there was a picture of a person twisted into a pretzel, and I couldn't risk happening upon the sight unprepared. I would turn the pages slowly around "CO," steeling myself for the shock.
     I've never quite figured out where this fear came from, but I suspect it was simple unfamiliarity. You tend to fear what you don't know.
      Over the years, the fear went away. This job helps. After spending a day at the morgue, or watching a plastic surgeon perform a nose job, you don't jolt so easily. I can flip through the c's in the dictionary easily now.
 


   All this came back to me last week, with the Sept. 21 issue of the New Yorker, which included a four-page Benetton ad featuring handicapped children. The first page is a gorgeous fashion shot of a boy with Down's Syndrome. Turn the page, and there is a two-page spread of a mother holding a boy whose hands are curled and jaw frozen by some sort of spastic condition. The mother cradles him lovingly.
     And finally, the fourth page is a grinning boy who, well, you can't tell what's "wrong," with him, if anything. Which is clever, if intentional, because readers are left examining the happy, freckled face of this child, trying to jam him into a category.
     Benetton, the Italian fashion designer, is famous for its jarring ads. They often are accused of taking advantage of graphic images to promote their label. But I think they should get credit for helping to extend the narrow boundaries of accepted "normality."
     Had Cynthia Cowles, or someone like her, appeared in a fashion ad in the New Yorker in 1969, I think we would have treated her better.
     Once I had been reminded of Cynthia Cowles, I couldn't let the matter drop without trying to make amends. I found her number and phoned her.
     Wonder of wonders, she was glad to hear from me.
     "I saw you on 'Oprah,' " she said. "You still play with your shoelace when you're nervous."
     She's married, for the last five years, and lives in Ohio. I told her I was sorry for how I acted in school, but her memory, thank God, did not jibe with mine.
     "If you were mean to me, there were so many other people who were so much worse," she said. "I recall you as being one of the kinder people. You were the one in eighth grade who came to visit me in the hospital -- you told me your mother made you come, but you stayed a half hour, very uncomfortably -- and brought a box of stationery."
     There was no rancor. In fact, she had sympathy for me.
     "You got teased for being fat, and got teased because you couldn't skip," she said, recounting how the gym teacher tried to drill me into skipping. "You were real good at galloping, but you couldn't skip."
     I had never known what was wrong with her, so I asked.
     "I was basically born without bone in my nose, and the front of my forehead was not closed," she said. "I'm hydrocephalic, which means my head is bigger than it should be, which put pressure on my brain."
     She had more than 60 operations in school. "Now I'm done," she said.
     We had a great conversation, with lots of laughing. She told a story about turning around and socking a kid who was teasing her; she was terrified because the assistant principal saw her do it.
     "But he just gave me the thumbs-up sign and said, 'If you didn't I was going to,' " she said.
     Socking the kid had been liberating for Cynthia Cowles. "My mother always thought if you ignored it, it would go away," she said.
     And I must say, I felt liberated myself, from a guilt that had gnawed at me for years until, with a lucky assist from a magazine ad, I turned to confront it.

                —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 20, 1998

Cynthia Ungemach died Dec. 31, 2018.

Monday, June 1, 2015

Hastert, Duggar aren't the real scandal


     It stays submerged.
     We glimpse it, then turn away as it disappears again. But it always comes back.
     A popular TV show implodes. We chatter about its fallen star. No sooner does the scandal start to fade, however, when a new one emerges: the former Speaker of the House is accused of paying a fortune to hush it up.
     Dennis Hastert's cash kept it quiet for years. Josh Duggar, reality TV star of "19 Kids and Counting," eked out a dozen.
     Their secret shame becomes fertile ground for public comment and eventual remorse. Hastert admits no wrongdoing, yet. Duggar does. "I acted inexcusably" he says, and TLC, to its credit, doesn't excuse him but yanks the hit show amidst general half indignant, half amused clucking about the frequent hypocrisy of those who flaunt their superior standards.
     Each case is easy to chatter about. Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post trenchantly observed how the Duggar crime is "a reminder of how badly the cult of purity lets victims down," portraying them as ruined bikes, cups of spit, chewed gum, as if their entire value lay in their sexuality. As with priests, when there are no sexual outlets, it's sometimes sought in the wrong places."
     "When all sexuality is a sin, when even holding hands is off limits, there isn't a clear line between permissible, healthy forms of exploration and acts that are impermissible to anyone, not just the particularly devout," she writes. "This gospel of shame and purity has the potential to be incredibly harmful because it does away with important lines."
     True enough. But there's much more to this than specific scandal, much more than further evidence of how dysfunctional the devout can be. We analyze individual cases, the life of one politician or one TV star, looking from one tree to the next without ever seeing the forest. Without ever realizing we should start talking about the tremendous toll that sexual and physical abuse takes on our general society right now, today, and into the foreseeable future. The true scandal isn't what Dennis Hastert might have done to boys at Yorkville High School or what Josh Duggar did to five girls. The scandal is how frequently this sort of thing, and far worse, happens.
     "People in law enforcement call it the biggest secret in American society," says Paul Biebel, presiding judge of the Cook County Criminal Court. I recently stopped by his office at the courthouse at 26th and California, a jumble of books and boxes, as he prepares to retire from his nearly half-century legal career. Conversation turns to the defendants found in his courtroom time and time again. They are, with astounding frequency, people who were abused, physically and sexually.
     "With physical abuse, it affects the brain," Biebel says. "What you'll find is a high percentage of street prostitutes were abused as girls."
     He sees it over and over, in perpetrators of heinous crimes and in low-level repeat offenders who just can't get their lives together.
     "What causes these people to screw up their lives so badly?" he asks. "Why is that? They grew up in very abusive households."
     Biebel's observations are anecdotal, but research backs him up.
     "When you do surveys of women in the criminal justice system, huge numbers were sexually abused," says Jody Rafael, a senior research fellow at DePaul University's College of Law. "Research samples in jails and prisons show the number of women in prison who have been victims of rape and sexual assault and domestic abuse are off the charts compared to the general population of women."
     She says that decades of a "lock 'em up and throw away the key" approach didn't work. "As we built more prisons, it got very expensive" so much so that more economical, more productive and, incidentally, more humane strategies are being tried. "We're moving away from retribution," she says. "We really have turned to seeing many of these people as vulnerable and victims needing a different approach, especially those connected to drug crimes. Treatment alternatives as opposed to locking them up for drugs. We're really viewing the drug possessor as a person with a medical problem that needs to be cured. We're in the midst of a change."
     About time.
     Before I leave Judge Biebel, I ask him: Given the pervasiveness of the problem of sexual abuse, why do we so vigorously ignore it?
     "It's too hard," he says. "It's a hard issue."