Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is one of those places where you are both lucky and unlucky to be.
     Bad that you have to be here.
     But if you have to be a place like this, better to be this place than many others.
     And I'll leave it at that.
     Business took me here, not personal matters, thank goodness.
     Which is not to take anything away from it.
     And besides, now I could never go at all.
     Which isn't as reassuring at it sounds.
     Anyway, where are these undulating aqua shapes? 
     The winner received one of my scorned 2015 blog posters, which I have in abundance.
     Place your guesses below.
     And good luck. 

Don't blame the Chinese, yet

     We teach kids the wrong stuff.
     Yes, multiplication is important. And you don’t want youngsters looking at a dollar bill and wondering, “Who’s the dude in the wig?”
     But we load students with too many dates, too many facts, too much Treaty of Ghent and not enough organizing concepts.
     Knowing a fact — the Civil War ended in 1865 — can be helpful in constructing an accurate view of the world. But knowing a concept helps you mold the countless facts encountered through life into meaning.
     If I had the chance to design a class for high school students, I would teach “Pattern Recognition.” Patterns explain so much: Why you wake up at night, startled, thinking the shirt you draped over a chair is an intruder. Why so many otherwise sane people believe the 9/11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy other than the actual conspiracy. Or why on Wednesday, when I saw that, in addition to United Airlines suspending its entire operations due to a computer malfunction, the New York Stock Exchange had also ceased trading, I tweeted two words: “The Chinese . . .”
     We connect dots, facts, and form patterns, some accurate, some illusional. United Airlines freezes up, Wall Street goes down, the Wall Street Journal home page too — obviously an attack — and China, causing computer trouble lately, the obvious culprit. The difference is, when officials announced that it wasn’t an attack, just coincidence, I accepted that. (Although, wouldn’t that be just what they would say, to avoid panic?)
     See, that’s what people do. They take a couple of data points and spin a story around it. That’s how the little pinpricks of light randomly jumbled in the sky became Orion the Hunter, Gemini the Twins, Queen Cassiopeia and such. Then we stick with that story, ludicrous though it be. Think of those constellations. All our technology, all the complicated history of the world, all the stuff we have to know now that shepherds 2,000 years ago didn’t have to know.
     So why does society still teach us the “W” in the sky is Cassiopeia — and I never bothered to find this out before — a Greek queen famous for her beauty? Whose vanity drew the wrath of the gods, which is why she is in that chair, the Earth’s rotation turning her upside down, punishing her.
     Heck, why not? The stars are always above — no glitches there — and separating them into little packages and giving those clusters personalities, well, maybe it makes the night less scary. We look up and see the Big Dipper, we recognize a pattern, like a friend’s face in a crowd. So not only do patterns alarm — the bear that isn’t there, the Chinese attack that wasn’t, apparently. But they also comfort.
     Technical disruption, temporarily and on a small scale, can be comforting too. Or at least a chance for a pause from routine. I like when the power goes out. We light a few candles and sit there, a routine evening turned into flickering drama. I’m sure after two days it would get old, but my power was never out for two days. Lucky me.
     Even computer crashes, annoying as they are, are also a reminder that this isn’t magic. It’s human agency. Robots won’t take us over; we’ll take ourselves over. The networks are all dependent on overworked, overheating server farms in places like Prineville, Oregon, and Weehawken, New Jersey, and right here in Chicago, where Microsoft has thousands of servers. Facebook has been wheezing lately, its data banks no doubt groaning under billions of users who all want to post video of their 4-year-old playing a bee in the school pageant. Facebook constantly crashes — “Aw, Snap!” Chrome’s error screen says — which was cute the first 20 times I saw it.
     I take Facebook’s sputtering as a karmic reminder that Facebook has peaked, and the less time I spend on it the better. We have to remember that all this online stuff is still relatively new and people are still figuring out how much of our lives to devote to it. I’m not suggesting the novelty might wear off. We won’t go back to pasting photos in scrapbooks or recording stock sales in ledger books. But we might decide to focus a tad more on the living world and a tad less on the Internet. It is possible. Isn’t it?

Books on the nightstand: "Phineas Finn"

 

Morgan Library

   Saving money isn't everything. There is also supporting local establishments which provide service and community that no web site could offer. So I make it a practice to shun Amazon, whenever possible, and stroll over to the Book Bin, my local book shop, to order the books I'm looking for. 

     I was in the process of paying for Alberto Manguel's "Curiosity," based entirely on a rapturous review in the Economist, when one of the Book Bin's friendly, helpful clerks, Allison, pointed out that I have been neglecting my "Books on the nightstand," section of the blog—a number of months have gone by. I apologized and told her I would get right to it. 

     That was weeks ago. And numerous times I meant to set down the novel reviewed below and report on it here. But I didn't want to pull myself away from reading it. As soon as I finished though, just last night, and while it is still fresh in mind, I want to use it to revivify the "Books on the nightstand" section o the blog, where I'll post this, and next week I'll tuck a review of Amanda Palmer's "The Art of Asking."

Phineas Finn,  by Anthony Trollope (Everyman, 1997)

    I don't read many novels, because they generally strike me as untrue. Whatever fantasy world is created is pallid compared with reality, the characters jerky with quirks and irrationalities, unbelievable puppets, compared to actual people, moving through un uninteresting tale.

    But occasionally a novel grabs me. 

    This was an improbable choice. Even Adam Gopnik's tribute to Anthony Trollope on his 200th birthday in the New Yorker in early May might not have prompted me to order it. I have an aversion to 19th century British novelists. I think I've read two Dickens novels, Great Expectations, in high school, and A Christmas Carol, several times, and as marvelous as those were, I was happy to leave it at that. 

    But Gopnik's 2008 essay on Samuel Johnson had set me off on a deeply satisfying journey into Johnson's vastly fascinating world, not only reading the biography he was reviewing—Samuel Johnson by Peter Martin—but tackling Boswell's epic Life of Johnson, a pure joy.

    So I figured, he didn't steer me wrong with the Great Cham of LIterature; perhaps I should trust him here, too. 

     So into Phineas Finn, an 1869 novel about a young Irishman who is put up for a seat in Parliament, his world of ministers and functionaries, plus assorted characters such as Quintus Slade of the People's Banner, one of the greasier journalists  to be found in literature, approaching those in real life. There are alluring, strong women characters: Lady Laura Standish, wed to to the rigid Robert Kennedy, and the buoyant Violet Effingham.

    The romantic ... well, not a triangle, more like a pentagram, when you include Madame Max Goesler and Mary Flood Jones, his sweetheart waiting patiently back at home—did keep my interest, but I was able to march through its 650 pages mainly due to the book's political tone, which rang a most contemporary note. Here is Finn and his friend Laurence Fitzgibbon debating how a vote will fall between the Tories and the Liberals.

    "But the country gets nothing done by a Tory government," says Phineas.

    "As to that, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other," replies his Fitzgibbon. "I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything. Give a government a real strong majority, as the Tories used to have half a century since, and as a matter of course it will do nothing. Why should it? Doing things, as you call it, is only bidding for power—for patronage and pay."

     That could be the Illinois government right now.  The cynicism of the book, 150 years old, is startlingly contemporary, such as when the hypocrisy of British leadership is painted as a good thing, at least compared to the sincerity of Americans. In Britain, rancorous Parliamentary debates end with the participants marching off arm-in-arm.

     "It is not so in the United States," writes Trollope. "There the same political enmity exists, but the political enmity produces private hatred. The leaders of parties there really mean what they say when they abuse each other, and are in earnest when they talk as though they were about to ear each other limb form limb."

Anthony Trollope

      The shabbiness of low level government is deliciously laid out by Trollope, who worked as a postal inspector in Ireland for years—some of Finn's friends express sincere condolences at the calamity of his election. But the higher levels fare little better.

     Here is  again is Fitzgibbon—who blithely reneges on a loan that Finn has signed for in an act of misplaced trust, causing Finn to be plagued by a colorfully dogged creditor—explaining the candidates for Prime Minister. 

     "There will be a choice out of three. There is the Duke, who is the most incompetent man in England; there is Monk, who is the most unfit; and there is Gresham, who is the most unpopular. I can't conceive it possible to find a worse Prime Minister than either of the three,— but the country affords no other."

     "And which would Mildmay name?" asks Phineas.

   "All of them,—one after the other, so as to make the embarrassment the greater."

    "Mildmay" points to one of the flaws in the book, Trollope's tendency toward illustrative names. There is the timid Mildmay, the radical Turnbull, the revered Duke of Omnium. Not quite Piers Plowman's wife, Dame Work-While-I-Am-Able, but uncomfortably close.  

     Still, I found myself eager to get back to the book, the mark of good fiction.  Trollope is a first rate writer, tossing off lines that should be epigrams assuming they weren't already when he used them: "But we all know how the man well spoken of may steal a horse, while he who is of evil repute may not look over a hedge." 
     Or, even better: "After all, money is an accident."

     Phineas Finn plunges readers into a world that is foreign—after Lady Laura flees her husband, the grim Mr. Kennedy threatens to go to law to drag her back—yet all-too-familiar. There's something reassuring about it. If our leaders are going to be dolts, at least we can comfort ourselves with the realization that we didn't invent the practice. The greatest recommendation I can give is that there is a second book, Phineas Redux and I am going to seek that out and dive in, just for the pleasure of hanging out with Phineas, Lady Laura, Madame Max and the rest of their diverting circle. It is summer, after all. 

     

      

     

Five rules for surviving The Taste

    For the record, I did once meet my family at Taste of Chicago and, to my boggled amazement, actually had fun, which surprised me because usually I'm reluctant to go to Taste on salary and an expense account. It just isn't my idea of fun. But three years ago the paper sent me, and I did my best to suck it up and enjoy the experience, in the process setting a few rules for others who'd like to do the same at Taste, which began Wednesday. 

     Like many Chicagoans who eat in restaurants as a matter of routine, I tend to look down on Taste of Chicago as an inexplicably popular opportunity for families from Schaumburg to drive into the city and eat an expensive slice of deep-dish cheese pizza while standing on the baking asphalt of Columbus Drive.
     But I know an order when I hear one, and given that there are guys whose job it is to defuse bombs in Afghanistan, I couldn't complain too much about being dispatched to Columbus and Monroe at the stroke of 11 a.m. Wednesday.
     The first person I see is none other than Sam Sianis, head herdsman of a flock of Billy Goat Taverns. He never misses a Taste.
     "I was at the first one, Chicago Fest in 1979," he says. "Good for us, good for the city. We make money."
     Though times have changed.
     "It's smaller now," Sam says. "I don't know why."
     The reason, as far as I understand it, is to cut back on the cost to the city by cutting back on the Taste—half as long, five days instead of 10, with fewer restaurants. It runs until Sunday.
     Sam says more, but his voice is drowned out by a chorus of "Cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger!" from his workers.
     A double cheeseburger costs nine tickets, and to translate that into real money takes figuring. For $8 you get 12 tickets, each with a face value of 50 cents, though each ticket really costs 66 cents, or $5.99 for a double cheeseburger (not bad, considering the same burger goes for $5.48 at the Goat on Lower Michigan).
     I'm not about to buy one. Rule No. 1: have a plan. My plan involves exotic tasting portions from restaurants off my beaten path—no burgers, no pizza, no hot dogs.
     I skip the first bank of ticket booths, and go to the interior booths—less crowded—and buy two 12-ticket strips for $16. Rule No. 2, have a budget.
     Since it's only 11:05, I decide to hold out until 12 and stroll the grounds, scouting. Cheapest eat? Two tickets will get you half a slice of watermelon at Dominick's. Priciest I saw: 24 tickets for the eight-wing bucket at Harold's Chicken Shack.
     At 12:01 p.m, I find myself in front of Vee Vee's African Restaurant. I order the red beans, rice and jerk chicken Taste portion—most booths have mini portions for those trying to hold true to the original idea of the Taste as a place to sample things. Five tickets get you a small paper trough half filled with rice, a few beans and a bit of jerk chicken—"jerk" is Nigerian for "boney," apparently. The concoction is smoky, watery, unappealing.
     Strolling down Columbus, Rule No. 3 forms: Remember sun block. I swing over to the trees for shade, toward the Family Village. Kids are being led through exercises by Maddie Murphy, a Stretch-N-Grow coach.
     Mustard-fried catfish calls out to me from B.J.'s Market and Bakery, 8734 Stony Island. I am rewarded with three generous nuggets of fish, piping hot and juicy, rolled in a crisp corn meal breading.
     Eat them. You'll thank me.
     Lou Malnati's Pizzeria offers a chopped salad Taste portion for 3 tickets, and since I must set an example to my young readers, I get in line, watching slice after slice of gooey deep dish pass over the counter, imagining the stunned reaction my request will get.
     "Salad?!" whoever takes my order will cry, as the Taste falls silent and heads pivot. "This man is asking for salad!!!"
     "We're out of chopped salad," a teen in the real world replies.
     "Come back in half an hour."
     It's 12:15. "Sold out already?"
     "Yup." Times change.
     Thinking to still get something cool between courses, I line up at Iyanze, 4623 N. Broadway for bissup—hibiscus sorbet. But the people in front get the jerk chicken and, thinking to compare, I follow suit, and am rewarded with a portion twice the size of Vee Vee's and four times as good.
     With nine tickets left, I figure go out with a bang, and line up at The Original Rainbow Cone. Their trademark cone is a blend of chocolate, strawberry, a favor they call "Palmer House"—vanilla with walnut and cherry chunks - pistachio and orange sherbet. Rule No. 4: it's Taste, it only comes around once a year, it's okay to indulge.
     Waiting in line, a breeze wafts from the lake. Buckingham Fountain spouts in glory. The clouds, white and wispy, the breeze, cool. Mmm, nice.
     I'm handed a drippy concoction heavy on the orange sherbet. But not bad. My plan is to stroll back toward the paper nursing it. Once again I am drawn toward the dimness of the trees, where I do something uncharacteristic: I sit down. Rule No. 5—remember to sit down. It is quiet, almost private, the Tasters milling past, young and old, all races, families and couples, office workers with their security tags.
     Ahh, summer in Chicago.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 12, 2012

Why religion is like a hammer

   There was a heartbreaking story on the front page of the New York Times Monday about a woman who fled the chaos of Myanmar with three of her four children, making the perilous sea journey to join her husband in slightly less chaotic Malaysia. It’s a long article, focusing on the child she left behind. But one phrase in one sentence leaped out at me. Let’s see if it leaps out at you too:
     “Her husband, who had raised shrimp and cattle, had been among tens of thousands who made the journey two years earlier, after Buddhist mobs rampaged through villages like their own, burning houses and killing at least 200 people.”
     “Buddhist mobs?” Rampaging and killing? I didn’t know Buddhists did that. What happened to the Eight-Fold Path? To saffron robes and shaved heads?

     When we think of bias, we think of negative prejudices. But positive biases can be just as misleading. It isn’t as if you need to think hard to find other examples of Buddhists betraying the tenets of their faith: monks in Japan in the 1930s, for instance, were almost universally supportive of that nation’s catastrophic march to global war.
     Not to single out Buddhists. Every faith has a litany of positive beliefs — God loves us all, we’re all part of His creation, do unto others as you would have others do unto you — that get swept aside when convenient.
     The mayor of Mundelein, Steve Lentz, drew attention — which is hard for a mayor of Mundelein to do — by turning his July 4 speech, normally a time of patriotic platitudes, into a denunciation of the “moral quagmire” society faces because we are more accepting of gays and unwed mothers. In saying this, he is viewing the world through one facet of the lens of his Christian faith. And that lens has turned the situation upside down as a lens will.
     Society easing up on its habit of punishing gays and single mothers is not an example of moral failure, but of moral clarity, a triumph of liberal compassion over the blurry forces of punitive religion. It’s closer to a miracle than a crisis. And while children raised by two parents indeed do better than children raised by one, that is a practical matter, not an ethical one. Drivers who wear seat belts also do better than drivers who don’t, yet nobody makes wearing a seat belt into an ethical issue. At least not yet.
     And not that morality is a poll, but most Americans find both gay marriage and out-of-wedlock childbirth to be acceptable, ethically.
     In the hands of people like Lentz, religious morality becomes a Divine Certificate of Merit to bestow on yourself and people exactly like you. It is a pass given uncritically to the home team. One they don’t deserve and one that hurts more than helps them. The surest sign of love isn’t a kneejerk pass, but careful attention and thinking. I adore my boys, but if they screw up, I’ll tell them. I think Israel is grand, but I also understand that Benjamin Netanyahu could start building concentration camps in Gaza and gassing the residents and a certain swath here would busy themselves explaining why that is OK.
     It’s very hard for people to grasp that the high regard they hold themselves in is not universally shared. There is a meme going around the Internet, a pair of photos. The top one shows a picture of robed members of the Klu Klux Klan.

     “No one thinks that these people are representatives of Christians,” it’s captioned.
     The next one shows a band of Islamic fighters under the black flag of terror.
     “So why do so many people think these people are representative of Muslims?”
     A point I heartily agree with. Still, looking at that top photo, I couldn’t resist.
     “No one?” I wrote.
     Because to me, Christianity, like every other religion, is the carte blanche that people give themselves to do horrible things. Murdering children in the name of Buddhism. Blowing up women in the name of Allah. Allowing millions to dwell in misery in the shadow of your land flowing with milk and honey. Shunning good people who have done nothing wrong in the name of Jesus’ love.
     I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Religion is a tool. Like a hammer. You can build a house with it. You can hit someone in the head. Your choice, not the hammer’s. But people are cowards, and the meaner they are, the more cowardly they tend to be. So they blame the hammer, thinking it excuses them. It doesn’t.

What panics Texas didn't raise an eyebrow here

     Each time I read another story about Texas officials, from the governor on down, wetting themselves because the U.S. military is conducting its usual maneuvers there—or the latest, jaw-dropping poll suggesting that one-third of Republicans believe Obama wants to invade Texas—I recall when the Marines were training on the streets of Chicago. Nobody panicked here, probably because we don't hate and fear our own government, nor live in hallucinatory dread of the government seizing our beloved guns. I covered the story, and got on so well with the Marines that they invited me to Camp Pendleton to observe their From the Sea training exercise, which was a blast. You miss out on a lot of life if you're cowering in the basement, fingering your weaponry security blanket and counting your cases of freeze-dried food. Of course this occurred in the late 1990s, which seems, at least from the perspective of today, a less fearful time.

Marines land here to study for urban battles of future

     About 80 U.S. Marines begin urban battle training in Chicago today, but don't expect any leathernecks to wade ashore at Oak Street Beach or set up bivouac under the Picasso at Daley Plaza.
     Rather, the Marines, mostly officers out of 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines, from Camp Lejeune, N.C., are studying the city's infrastructure—the bridges, tunnels, subways, electrical system, sewers, water treatment plant, communications—to help guide the formation of 21st century city combat techniques.
     "This has to do with decision-making," said Lt. Col. Jenny Holbert, a public affairs officer for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va., which is running the visit. "How do you change the way Marines make decisions in urban settings as opposed to open, unconstrained battlefields?"
     The experimental project, Urban Warrior, is the second phase of a two-part program that began in 1995 with Hunter Warrior, which looked at fighting in open rural spaces. Urban Warrior began last summer and will culminate next year.
     With forecasters predicting that 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities by 2020, the Marines are preparing for future battles taking place in foreign cities.
     Chicago is the first city to host the Marines as part of Urban Warrior. New York City, Jacksonville, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., will hold events this year. The project will end with a mock battle in an undisclosed West Coast city.
     In New York, the Marines will be exploring what is called "cross-canyon mobility."
     "How do you move from the 12th floor of one skyscraper to the ninth floor of another and do horizontal resupply," Holbert said. "We're working with the British Royal Marines and the Dutch Marines on that."
     Not only are the Marines here to learn, but in return they will be telling city officials about military techniques that might be helpful in civilian emergencies.
     "We've been working on some projects we think might be of benefit to the city," Holbert said, citing a new communications technology that allows soldiers to talk from one room to another in hardened buildings. "That might have direct applications for firefighters."
     Holbert said the Marine Corps had no difficulty arranging the visit with the city.
     "They've been absolutely wonderful," she said. "I don't think we could have picked a better city. They have really opened the doors to us and really helped us a lot. We're really going to be able to get a lot of information about how a very complex city works."

                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 5, 1998

Donald Trump is a boon to the GOP

   

     Politics is usually what is called a “zero-sum game.”
     Or in English, “I win/You lose.”
     Something bad for the other guy is good for you.
     A blow to the Republicans is a boon for the Democrats.
     And vice versa.
     But politics isn’t everything.
     Take the latest Donald Trump presidential eruption.
     Common wisdom is that the crass, vain, logorrheic Trump will hurt the Republican Party with his comic opera campaign, his tendency to say almost anything and then stick to it.
     You hear the term “blithering idiot,” but how many times do you actually hear a man blither? Donald Trump blithers.
     But I honestly believe Trump will help the Republicans in their bid to take over the White House after eight years of exile. If not, he’ll still end up helping the country.
     How?
     First, he might win.
     Think back to a previous laughable candidate, who Democrats like me just couldn’t believe was running. He was a rich Hollywood actor who plugged Borax on television and starred in a movie with a chimp. He said so many stupid things — to Democratic ears, anyway — pundits gathered them into books. He was a joke.
     That candidate was Ronald Reagan, of course. While I think Reagan had much more going for him — his folksy charm, his twinkle, as opposed to Trump’s gut-turning hair edifice, his “I’m very rich” shrug and tendency to snarl — Trump taking it from the current field of pygmies is not outside of the realm of possibility. He isn’t even the most ridiculous New York area candidate. That would be New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
     But I don’t think Trump will help the cause by winning.
     He’ll help by being an unavoidable embodiment of his failed beliefs. His presidential announcement contained this jaw-dropping denunciation of Mexican immigrants, not a gaffe or a misstatement, but something he said early on in the speech at Trump Tower announcing his candidacy.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best; they’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

     This is untrue on so many levels, it’s such a classic piece of xenophobic fear mongering, the media fell to picking it apart. Painting immigrants as criminals is an American tradition. The Irish were criminals. Italians were criminals. Jews were criminals. And while all those groups, being humans, contained criminals, and might be pushed in that direction by the power structure freezing them out of jobs, there was nothing intrinsic about Irish, Italians, Jews — or Mexicans — that made them criminals.
     And, in fact, scholars show that immigration affects our crime rate — which has been tumbling for years — not at all.
     By twirling in the spotlight with his hateful screed — one of my colleagues called it “critical candor;” though were I groping for an alliteration I’d go with “bigoted B.S.” — Trump might help the Republicans finally see that it’s wrong.
     A foul person or act can bring clarity to a moral wrong. Trump’s like the Westboro Baptist Church, which if anything makes people more sympathetic to gays by airing their hatred in such an odious fashion. I’m not comparing Donald Trump to Dylann Roof. But the 21-year-old, by killing nine people in church after embracing the Confederate flag, finally made people understand what the flag is really about. Suddenly, people got it. And Donald Trump, by including the stereotypical sexual panic that is at the heart of so much racism — “They’re rapists” — might make it a little easier to whatever non-loathsome candidate the Republicans end up with (my guess is Jeb Bush) to back away a step or two from the immigration cliff the party seems intent on leaping over again.
     So that’s good for them. And while that might be bad for Democratic chances, it’s good for the country as a whole. Because we are never going to deport those 11 million illegal immigrants. They’re going to gain civil rights, eventually. And their children will, like every other second-generation group, become politically powerful. Donald Trump just doesn’t get it. But he doesn’t get it in such a persistent, public, obnoxious and embarrassing way, he might just help others to finally understand. And that’s good for everybody.