Mass shootings aren't the problem

     A 6-year-old boy shot his 3-year-old brother to death in Chicago last Saturday.
     Leading to no public soul-searching, no local, never mind national, catharsis. People hardly noticed.
     Which is strange, because this kind of tragedy — or, if you prefer, crime, since the child found the gun left atop a refrigerator by his father, Michael Santiago, who is now charged with child endangerment — is symbolic of our nation's gun crisis.
     We snap to attention at mass shootings, with round-the-clock coverage, and intense thumb twiddling.
     But mass shootings are not the problem. Not close, not compared to everyday gun violence.
     According to the FBI, 486 people were killed in mass shootings in the United States between 2000 and 2013. Or between 30 and 40 a year.
     Now lets look at the numbers of people who intentionally shoot themselves: about 20,000 a year. An additional 11,000 are murdered by others wielding guns. And 600 more, like the 3-year-old boy, are shot and killed in accidents.
     So why the sound and fury after mass shootings? And the cough-into-the-fist at individual shootings?

     Mass shootings are scary. We can imagine someone bursting in and shooting us. Hard to imagine shooting ourselves, even though the odds are 1,000-to-1 in favor of the latter. The media is run by human beings, and like all human beings we have a tendency to ignore what's important in favor of obsessing over what's shiny, or novel, or scary, or dramatic.
     The common wisdom — and I've written this myself — is that nothing will be done toward adopting a sane national approach to guns because gun owners are so passionate in their support of gun rights. Their solution is always more guns, not fewer. The National Rifle Association has Congress in the palm of its hand to such a degree that it stripped funding to the Centers for Disease Control that went to gun violence research (a reminder of how wrong people can be — false patriots claim their guns protect our freedoms, when the exact opposite is true: the gun lobby undermines the basic American freedom to investigate the facts of our lives).
     Yet there is hope. There is a model for success, the story of a formerly huge national problem, worsened by rich interests and entrenched public delusion, eventually made less huge after decades of hard work: smoking.

      Fifty years ago, half of the adults in this country smoked. Smoking was cool. Even after the Surgeon General's report linked cigarettes and cancer, it took decades for attitudes to change. If you had told people that smoking would be banned in offices and bars, aboard airplanes and even on some streets, they'd have laughed at you. Go to a bar and not smoke?
     Now only a quarter of adults smoke. Millions of lives have been saved. How? Facts are sticky. No matter how much hype and spin gets sprayed at them, the facts remain. Smoking really does kill you. As do guns. Arguments for their value are delusional, like Ben Carson's idiotic imagining that arming Germany's Jewish population would have prevented the Holocaust. (The French army had guns; didn't help them). Or episodic: Someone, somewhere occasionally uses a gun for a legitimate protective purpose. But that is an extreme rarity, the comfort hiding the peril. Cigarettes make you more relaxed, so you ignore the danger. Ditto for guns. They help you feel safe, the illusion of protection masking the hard reality: that you don't usually shoot the gang-banger coming through the door; what happens, usually, is one of your kids shoots another.
     With cigarettes, before laws changed, perceptions had to change. Slowly smoking went from something desirable to a personal flaw.
     Ditto for guns. The NRA is trained to snarl against anyone proposing laws, but it's too early to push for laws. What we should push is the unvarnished truth, supported by the overwhelming evidence. Buying a gun makes you more imperiled, not safer. It increases the risk you will kill yourself, that you will kill your family members, or they will kill you — or each other.
     Those are just the facts.
     The father of those two boys bought his gun for what seems like a valid reason — he had testified against a gang member and was worried that the gang might come for him. But they never did. And now they don't have to. But let us not focus on this case. Because someone else will be shot tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that . . .

What to Do With Louie, Revisited

   
     A family on the next block put up this sign in their yard — actually a number of them. Which made me think of Louie Herrera, a 28-year-old man who lives in Elmhurst with his family who, coincidentally, have a similar sign in their yard. 
     I met Louie and his family six years ago, after his mother wrote to object to a piece I had written about Misericordia, the home for people with developmental challenges. Those kids would be fine, she suggested. But what about her son, who had just turned 22 and thus was no longer eligible for state services? I think she was surprised to hear back from me, and even more surprised to find me in her kitchen shortly thereafter. 

     If Louie Herrera's parents beat him, if they abused or abandoned him, then he'd be all set: The State of Illinois would be able to swoop in and see that Herrera, who has Down syndrome, was placed in a large, public facility that could offer structure -- supervision, classes and work experience -- to help him live a full life.
     "That, unfortunately, is true," says Lilia Teninty, director of the Division of Developmental Disabilities for the Illinois Human Services Department. "We have 'crisis criteria,' where, if people need that, we immediately put them into services. Beyond that, we don't have a lot of flexibility in adding services."
     Alas, Herrera is not in crisis. He is the "heart and soul" of a tight-knit, loving family in Elmhurst, which, unfortunately, happens to be in Illinois, thus creating a further difficulty.
     If Herrera lived in another state, he might be able to avail himself of services from a small group home or shelter workshop located in his neighborhood -- in Michigan, 82 percent of people with developmental disabilities are served in such settings. In Illinois, the figure is 30 percent, making it dead last -- 50th out of 50 states, right behind Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas -- when it comes to supporting community services for people with disabilities.
     Scarce Illinois resources are focused on large facilities, and even those are hard to get. People with disabilities who are trying to find whatever help is available in Illinois go on a waiting list to be evaluated. That waiting list currently has 16,000 names on it.
     "We don't have enough money to serve them all," says Teninty.
     That's the bad news.
     The really bad news, for Louie Herrera, is that his name isn't even on the 16,000-person waiting list. His family has been told that now that he has become an adult -- his 22nd birthday was Friday -- he is officially on his own, and the state cannot give him even the hope of any kind of assistance.

                                                                - - -

     Louie Herrera is a broad-shouldered, sturdy young man with a ready smile. Though some of his tastes mirror those of his peers -- he plays and coaches basketball and enjoys cooking -- his musical preferences are unconventional for someone of his age.
     "I like watching the Wiggles," he says, sitting in his mother's tidy kitchen, with its rooster motif. "I like 'Hannah Montana.' "
     Herrera was born with an extra 21st chromosome, a condition commonly called Down syndrome. Because of that extra chromosome, he exhibits a range of traits, including almond-shape eyes, a percussive manner of speaking and an IQ of about 50.
     I met Louie because his mother, Cheryl, wrote to me after I ran a column about Misericordia, the large Catholic facility on the North Side for people with developmental disabilities. She said that such places are fine, if you can get into them. But what about all those thousands of people who can't get in? Or those who don't want to go to a large setting and live with hundreds of people?
     The Herreras would prefer Louie to stay at home, where he has always been, and where most people with disabilities -- where most people, period -- prefer to be. But finding someplace nearby that welcomes someone like Louie Herrera can be next to impossible.
     "We've been finding a lot of these shelter workshops have been closed down as a result of funding," says his father, Louis Herrera. "Even if you do find a slot, you have to pay for it."
     Their search has been mirrored statewide. The struggle between a system that favors large institutions and the trend toward small community homes is a central concern for the disabled community.
     "This is not just about service, not just about a system that supports institutionalization vs. community living," says Marca Bristo, CEO of Access Living, a Chicago advocacy group for the disabled. "This is at the heart of our civil rights struggle."
     "Civil rights" may be a phrase not much associated with the disabled, but courts have increasingly viewed their situation in that light — the landmark 1999 Supreme Court Olmstead decision said, basically, that forcing citizens to receive care in large facilities when they prefer not to is a form of discrimination.
 

Louie Herrera, in a recent photo

   "We see so many people, especially young people, who have no business in nursing homes, ending up in them," says Bristo. "Some go in for short-term stays because they have some medical issue that needs to be addressed, and they never get out — and they never get out because of the way our public financing system is set up. It doesn't support community-based living. It's an individual's battle to find their way out."
     Battle is the word. Cheryl Herrera gave me a thick stack of photocopies of the letters, forms and reports she either sent or received trying to find a place for her son once he turned 22 and could no longer go to Elmhurst schools. She works as a substitute teacher, her husband as an accountant, so paying for Louie's care themselves is not an option. Yet leaving him at home would be like parking a 7-year-old in front of the TV for nine hours a day and hoping for the best.

                                                                                 
                                                                 - - -

     Those who are not related to someone who has Down syndrome, who have never met one, might automatically be put off by their outward appearances and thus may fail to grasp how loved they are as individuals by their family and friends.
     "Louie is the heart and soul of the family," says his father. "He has an outgoing, extraverted personality and is so pure in his nature and how he views things. So many people are touched by him when they meet him."
     One of those Louie Herrera touched most deeply is his younger brother, Doug.
     "People have misconceptions about everything having to do with special needs," says Doug, who's 19. "They look at them and see someone who's different, someone who drools or walks funny. They're too timid to actually get to know them."
     A sophomore at Illinois State University, Doug Herrera is studying special education and plans to spend his career working with people like his older brother.
     "I've always looked up to him," Doug Herrera says. "Through him, I've gotten to know a whole bunch of people with other disabilities, growing up and meeting his friends, hanging around his classrooms. I was always involved with people with special needs, always able to work with them. It's a rewarding job, and I really developed a passion for it."

       —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times Feb. 8, 2009

     Update
    The deep cuts to state programs since this was written have not affected the life of Louie Herrera. 

    "He's actually doing pretty good," Cheryl Herrera told me Monday. "He does a couple of programs; right now he's doing one through Gigi's Playhouse, out in Hoffman Estates, three days a week.  It's a little far, but we're managing. Two other days he's at Monarch, through Ray Graham, and in that one, he's really out and about in the community." 
     When we spoke on Monday, they had just gotten home from the library.
     "Louie likes the library," she said. "We go once a week."  
     Louie also works one day a week at a local camera shop, Elmhurst Photo on Spring Road, helping to clean and handle small tasks.
     "He feels very useful," his mother said. 
     His brother, Doug Herrera, who was studying to be a special education teacher in 2009, is now 26 and doing just that.
    "He works with really significantly-challenged kids at the Kirk School in Palatine," his mother said 
     

Cubs doomed

     A grim Monday morning.
     The Cubs down, two games to zip in the National League Championship Series. Last week's carnival air of inevitability turned to gloom or, more likely, completely forgotten. An embarrassing, temporary mania.
     Of course, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, the Cubs have as yet only lost the first game to the Mets Saturday night. But I'm going to go out on a limb, take one for the team, and brazenly assume they've lost the second too, because a) it's the Cubs and they probably will b) it might be the best chance of ensuring they'll actually win Sunday night.
     How can that be?
     Baseball is not just bats and balls, throws and catches. Baseball is our most spiritual sport, sometimes more of a religion than a display of athletic prowess. It's karmic. The Cubs and their famous curse are only the beginning. In our age of the dominance of flashier, faster, more TV-friendly sports such as football and basketball, the mere survival of baseball is a true miracle.
     The baseball gods demand caution, modesty, and they must be appeased. When they are ignored, when you cross the Great Wheel of Baseball Fate, there are consequences. I saw this disaster looming last week, when the whole city started skipping around Wrigley Field as if it were a maypole, glorying in the team's surprising victory, like Israelites driven mad by the golden calf. They did things they shouldn't have done, and said things they should not have said. I kept my mouth zipped shut -- well, one tweet on Friday:
     "Chicagoans are so excited about the Cubs, I'm reluctant to whisper, 'Isn't this the point where they collapse and break your hearts again?'"
     No one noticed or replied. No one wanted to face the truth.
     Then came what was to me — averse as I am to challenge a colleague — the Kiss of Death, Saturday morning.
     "THEY'RE GOING ALL THE WAY" screamed the headline on Rick Morrissey's column.
     Oh no, I thought, aghast.
     "They look unbeatable."
     No!
     "A force of nature."
     No, no!
     "The Cubs have become America's team."
     No, no, NOOO!     
     I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that Rick Morrissey is not Jewish. So he is not familiar with a concept that in Yiddish is called the "kine hora." The evil eye. I suppose the closest equal in English is "counting your chickens before they're hatched." I think of it as "Flipping off Fate."
     I suppose its a result of all the "Moneyball" sabermetric number crunching that has so afflicted baseball in recent years, as if you could measure Rizzo's bone density and the humidity of the air blowing in from right field and call the series for Chicago. You can't. Baseball isn't math, it's poetry. Not science but philosophy. Baseball breaks your heart ("It is designed," baseball commissioner A. Bart Giamatti once wrote, "to break your heart.")
     Although the Cubs droopping the first two --if that's what they have done -- might be a secret kindness. What makes the Cubs such a special team, such a valuable commodity? Obviously not their string of championship victories. Just two things, really, in my estimation: 1) They play at Wrigley Field. and 2) their incredible World Series drought, which grows year by year.
     The two are not unrelated. A winning team would have moved out to DuPage County years ago. The Cubs are like Naples--success eluded them, they were spared the ravages of economic progress, and now failure is their success. When the Boston Red Sox ended their streak in 2004, it was a moment of joy, yes, but the joy that comes from leaping from a high place. Then they hit hard reality, won two more championships, and are now just another winning team, a sort of New York Yankees Lite.
     Is that what you really want? Fine. Consider this column my sacrifice on the Sacred Baseball Altar. The illusion of the fan is that they matter. That if they wear their lucky hat, and cheer loud enough, the team will win. I'm not a fan, I've only been to one game this year. But I know how important this is to people, and want to do my part. Boldly predicting defeat Sunday night and standing by that prediction, even if wrong, is the best guarantee that they may somehow win. If they lose, when they lose, then I will have been correct. And if through some miracle they somehow manage to win, well, I'll look bad, but I'll also know that I've played my part in their victory.  It worked for Br'er Rabbit.
     And if this all sounds crazy well, remember, it's sports commentary. It's supposed to sound crazy.

"Crawl across the floor to me."

Photo: Richard Chapman, Chicago Sun-Times

     This is one of my favorite columns, and I'm reprinting it today simply because I happened upon the photograph, and thought it might amuse you. I was savvy enough not to have had a picture taken of my own session with Mistress Lilith—didn't want THAT floating around the Internet—but this one, featuring one of her customers. He showed up because he was commanded to, and never spoke. The difficulty of finding customers who would go on the record about their experiences was part of the reason I decided to go through the process myself. I'd like to say it caused a commotion when it was printed, but it really didn't. I think I got three emails. 



     "How should I address you?"
     "You may call me 'Mistress.' "
     "Thank you, mistress. What would you have me do?"
     "Take off all your clothes and put them in the basket."

     Less than two blocks from the Thompson Center, in a small, older building in the North Loop, is a plain glass door facing the L tracks. Press No. 3 on the buzzer, climb a long staircase, and you will find yourself in the dimly lighted confines of the Continuum Dungeon, where Chicagoans of a certain stripe go to act out their fantasies. The main room is large, with a black floor and light gray walls festooned with chains and manacles. There is a floor-to-ceiling case displaying whips, riding crops, paddles and flails; a padded table with restraints at the four corners; an oak coffin; stocks, and various ropes, pulleys and leather devices.
     
     "Kneel in front of me, slave. You may show your devotion by kissing my shoes."
     "Thank you, mistress."

     Within the dungeon, Lilith, 21, sits upon a wooden throne and issues commands. She is wearing a $400 black leather corset with steel stays, purchased for her by an admirer, a brief miniskirt, mesh stockings that stop at mid-thigh, and a dramatic pair of 8-inch stiletto platform shoes. She keeps her gaze politely in the middle distance. Her feet are faintly perfumed. Lilith is a student at Oakton Community College, where she is studying psychology.

     "Now kiss each buckle."
     "Thank you, mistress."

     Domination is a variety of fetish -- a fetish being where people are sexually attracted to physical objects, such as shoes and leather, ropes and whips, or to scenarios -- the nurse, the teacher, the dominatrix. The Continuum has a small, faux clinic for those attracted to medical procedures, complete with a stainless steel tray of surgical instruments, and a special room for cross-dressers.
     None of this is my cup of tea, personally. But the opportunity presented itself -- over Thanksgiving, ironically enough. I was standing in our kitchen, helping prepare the holiday meal, and my sister-in-law mentioned that an employee of hers is a professional dominatrix.
    "Now that's an interesting profession," I replied, explaining that I once tried to find a dominatrix to interview, and phoned up a few. But none of them wanted to be in the newspaper.
     "I'm sure she will," said my sister-in-law.
     She was right.

     "Come over here. Stand on this platform."
     "Yes mistress."

    Lilith is waiting beside a large St. Andrew's cross, made of sturdy wooden beams, with hand restraints chained to eye bolts. She buckles me in place. There is a mirror, to the right, and I catch my reflection and smile -- strange job, this. She gives me a preliminary slap on the butt, and I flinch involuntarily. "Twitchy," she says, with a trace of bemusement in her voice, reaching for a paddle with leather on one side and fur on the other.
     There are between 50 and 100 dominatrices in Chicago -- it isn't as if they have a union that keeps track. They are not prostitutes, generally, though as with so much on the periphery of human behavior, definitions tend to blur. Think of the profession as a spectrum, with one extreme being women who consider themselves priestesses, to whom being a "domme" is part of a complex lifestyle of tattoos, music and philosophy, blending into those whose focus is on the subculture's obvious theatrical aspects, and ending up with hookers with deep closets.
     Lilith, her hips tattooed with snakes, considers herself on the priestess end of the scale. She is proud of the college paper she wrote, passionately defending domination as an appropriate profession for feminists, and views her work with a considerable professional pride, a work ethic I come to appreciate.
     "People are always telling me, it must be a great job -- you get to take out your aggression on clients," she says, later. "But if you have that mentality, you're not going to be a pro domme. You're exploring a fantasy. You're not actually angry. If you're blinded by rage, you could seriously hurt someone. In order to be safe, you have to know what you're doing."
     We began by sitting together on a Victorian sofa and talking about what I wanted -- since all of this was new, I ask for a Whitman sampler of the sort of things that people typically request. My only stipulations were that I don't want to be suffocated, don't want to be permanently injured, nor was I interested in her ridiculing me.
     "I work at a newspaper," I told her. "I get enough of that already."
     We established a safe word -- "yellow" if I'm feeling at my physical limit, "red" if I want to stop. There were no waivers or paperwork to sign, which is more than I can say about the paper.
     "You requisitioned a $200 advance," a nervous secretary had said the day before, coming into my office. "You need to sign for that."
     "Right," I said, signing my name. "I'm being beaten by a dominatrix."
     "So I heard," she said. "What GSL code should I put for that?"
     "I don't know," I said. "7410 -- research?"

     "Lie on the table, on your back, with your head over here."
     "Yes mistress."
     "Scoot forward a bit -- that's it."
     "May I ask you a question, mistress?"
     "Yes."
     "What is that device?"
     "It's a purple wand -- an expensive Tesla coil."

     She arranges the electrical device, tucking a long metal probe into her decolletage, so that the blue sparks come from her fingertips -- the shocks are unpleasant but endurable. The dripped wax is also uncomfortable yet tolerable -- she holds the candle high, so that by the time it reaches my arms, it's not that hot. She is very poised and methodical, with one hand on her corsetted hip, occasionally giving an order, occasionally saying "Hmmmm," almost to herself, as if trying to figure out a puzzle.
     Lilith became interested in domination when she was a student at Evanston Township High School. "She's just following in the family tradition," said her mother, 47, who decided to have children -- Lilith and her sister -- without troubling herself with a husband. "Her grandmother is an out lesbian. My grandfather -- her great-grandfather -- fought in the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. We're a family of revolutionaries."
     Lilith's mother was born in Chicago but settled in Israel, where Lilith was born. Her mother -- who works as a quality auditor and so doesn't want her name used -- moved back to Chicago when Lilith was 7. As a girl, Lilith was, by her mother's account, of ordinary sensibilities. "She was very into Barbies," her mother said, speculating that her daughter was first attracted to the clothing of domination. "I think it was the wardrobe," she said. "She was making her own corsets in high school. She's always been kind of out there."
     I asked Lilith's mother if she worried about her daughter being immersed in this lifestyle.
     "I personally think it has been very empowering for her," she said. "She isn't normally a dominant human being. When she's not in the role, she's the opposite."
     Lilith's mother is proud that her daughter has found this cause.
     "She wants it to be more accepted," she said. "It's the next thing that society needs to get over, like racism was, once upon a time. It's a stigma, at the moment, but it's just as normal as anything else."

     "Crawl across the floor to me."
     "Yes mistress."
     "Get into the coffin . . ."
     
     "Submissives get into an altered state of consciousness" said Lilith, later, and that sounds about right. It did not feel upsetting, nor humiliating, just a calm interplay of instruction and compliance.
     I'm sure some readers might find it odd that I actually underwent this, as opposed to watching someone else do it, but I didn't see the harm, and it seemed the most effective way to absorb the experience. Of course I asked my wife ahead of time if she minded and, after a conversation that can be imagined, she set aside her objections.
     Lilith's boyfriend of 18 months or so also looks askance at her profession. "He hates it," she said. "But he's not going to stop me from doing it."
     For me it might be a lark — an interesting way to get out of the office on a Wednesday afternoon. But what about people who go to these places sincerely? Who are they? Lilith says that many of her clients are businessmen. "They have so much control in their professional lives," she said. "Here, they don't have control."
     She won't go into specifics — confidentiality is very big in domination. But she said I would be surprised by her list of customers. ("The mayor?" I asked, hopefully. But she demurred).
     "The type of people who come to sessions are the last people you expect to show up," she said. "The kinkiest people I know are accountants."
     Sigmund Freud traces this phenomenon to early Oedipal urges, of course. In a 1919 essay, he writes about boys who, feeling guilty about their sexual impulses toward their mothers, welcome punishment as their just due and, later, grow to associate the pain of discipline with the pleasure they believe they are being punished for. It makes as much sense as anything else, and there probably is not one single reason anyway.
     "It differs for every person who's doing it," says Dr. Domeena Renshaw, a psychiatrist at Loyola University who specializes in sexual abnormality. "It isn't a cookie cutter or a rubber stamp. Instead it depends on many things — early experiences, curiosity, what they're reading, and of course stuff on the Internet titillates and teases them and they explore the exotic of erotica."
     This once-remote world is certainly now a few keystrokes away from anybody. The Continuum has its own Web site — continuumchicago.com — as does Lilith, who lists her profession as "Dominatrix" on her MySpace page. It would take you two seconds to find it on Google.
     
     "Now lie on the table, face down this time."
     "Yes mistress."

     The coffin was actually restful. She secured it with a chain that clanked ominously, but there was a crack that let in light and air, and I'm not claustrophobic.
     Toward the end of the session, there was a moment—bound to a studded spanking bench, hand and foot, with elaborate knots which Lilith tied with extreme care—that I had a surprising realization: I was bored, somewhat, even buck naked, being straddled by a pretty woman hitting me with a riding crop.
     In my view, an hour with a dominatrix could be most readily compared to attending a Bears game at Soldier Field in winter — novel, yes, but also uncomfortable, expensive and ultimately more thrilling to anticipate than to experience. In both cases, I was glad I went, once, but it was obviously something that other people enjoy a whole lot more than I do, and I doubt I'd go back, particularly if I had to foot the bill myself.
     Part of that might have been my fault — I told her I didn't want to be hurt too much, and she never did anything particularly extreme, never got out the major league whips.
     "I was tempted to," she said, later. "But I thought, 'No, I should make sure he enjoys himself.' "
     Perhaps for that reason, the experience did not seem disgusting or perverse. The place was very clean. They seem thorough about cleaning and disinfecting between sessions. Philosophically, I could see being offended, if you view it as mock torture — this is not a real dungeon, these are not real whips, and to pretend they are could be seen as an affront to those actually subjected to these things, to real prisoners actually being abused against their will.
     But that's a stretch — we don't condemn actors performing Shakespeare because they don't really die. When I think of people who seek this out, for their pleasure, I do not feel revulsion so much as sympathy. If one's idea of a good time necessitates hiring someone like Lilith for $200 an hour and repairing to a place such as this, it would naturally tend to limit one's ability to derive satisfaction out of their lives.

     "Our hour is almost up -- was there anything you particularly liked?"
     "Liked? The paddle with the fur wasn't bad."

     Boredom might not be the standard response however -- at the very end, she asked if I needed a few minutes alone with myself and a few paper towels.
     "Umm, actually no," I said, feeling quite deflated. "No offense intended, but it was not what I would call an erotic experience."
     Nor is being a dominatrix, though it is not without its pleasures.
     "The job itself is not erotic," she said. "But I enjoy it. The point is to have fun. To relax, and enjoy yourself. When you think about it, why would anyone want to come in and be tortured, to have something truly painful done to them? There has to be some appeal. What you normally think of as pain can turn into pleasure, and that is the appeal."

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 23, 2007

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Maybe because it's new — since it's just now being built, it would kind of have to be — and off the beaten track, I saw this construction and thought, "Maybe...."
     I couldn't be confident, since you've cracked absolutely everything I've thrown at you, including last week's carpet bagger from Philadelphia. But this might prove something of a challenge. That's the hope at least ...
     Anywhere, where is this thing? The winner will receive one of my last 2015 posters, whose stock, I am happy to report, slowly diminishes. Post your guesses below. Good luck.

Does the law help or hinder?

     PHILADELPHIA: George Washington didn't want to attend the Constitutional Convention, never mind be its president. But duty called, again, and the weary general left his beloved plantation over the summer of 1787 to sit for three months in a mahogany armchair that is still there, a gilt half sun carved into the back.
     My wife and I found ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love last week, to attend a wedding. We had the chance to do a bit of sightseeing. I chose the Barnes Foundation, the eccentric private museum gone public. More Renoirs than you can shake a stick at.
     And my wife, officer of the court that she is, chose Independence Hall, the former seat of the Pennsylvania legislature, now shrine to the idea that Americans, at one point in our national story, could, if not exactly set aside their selfish interests, then bend them a little toward a national unity in such short supply nowadays.
     Visiting Independence Hall, like visiting the Liberty Bell, is free, but for the former you need a timed ticket. Requesting a ticket at 9 a.m. got us one good for 11 a.m., and I scanned nearby attractions, looking for one that might be worth two hours.
    "What's the 'National Constitution Center?" I asked a ranger, who said in essence, "it's a center dedicated to our nation's Constitution." Not much to go on, but enough to send us shuffling there to see what it was about.
     We ended up in "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government's Effect on the American Diet," and if that sounds like traffic school to you, it's good you didn't marry me or my wife, because it was a toss up which of us were more delighted. How could you not love an exhibit that tells you, right off the bat, that Thomas Jefferson smuggled rice out of Italy in his pockets, risking a death sentence, to see if it could grow in our nascent country?
     "This is so cool," my wife gushed. "I love this."
     The centuries-old relationship between our government and seeds mirrors the national schism we have now. In the 19th century, the idea was to kick start agriculture and get the hardiest plants into the hands of farmers. So the government not only gave seeds away for free, but sent scientists around the world to find more. Eventually putting the government on a collision course with the seed industry, which couldn't turn a profit selling what the government gave away, one of the countless ways business and government clash.
     Chicago is well-represented, alas, in the section on tainted foods, which included a series

of South African postcards mocking tainted canned meats.
     Just before 11, we pulled ourselves away, with great reluctance, and bolted for Independence Hall, where we met our guide, park ranger Helen McKenna, a 21-year National Park Service veteran. You would think her talk would be a bored recitation of Founding Fathers minutia. But other than pointing out Washington's chair, she explained that guides to independence Hall get to write their own presentations, and proceeded to deliver a short tutorial in American freedoms that probably was more challenging than many college classes.
   

Not happy to live in a nation of laws.

 McKenna asked our group to consider whether we think that the law protects our freedoms, or limits them. Then she asked that we divide ourselves accordingly and explain our choices. I joined the 50 or so people on the side who feel protected by the law, facing seven on the other who feel hobbled by it, which augurs well for the Democrats, since the belief that law maintains and supports our social order is a distinctly Democratic notion, while the idea that it hobbles our God-given freedoms and must be pared back in all places, is the Republican mantra.
     Afterward, I quizzed McKenna on how the groups usually divided themselves, and she said it varied widely. She's had entire school groups of African-American students gather on the "limited freedom" side and when she asked them to explain why, they said, "Trayvon Martin."
     I wasn't used to tours of historical locations being mini-civics lessons, and wondered how that came about.
     "It is a new thing," said Jane Cowley, public affairs officer at Independence National Historical Park. "It's called 'facilitated dialogue.' Our park rangers interpret history, interpret the resource for our visitors. It's a technique used to engage the visitor, as you experienced."
     It is not a practice limited to the rooms where our nation was born.
     "The interpreters (or tour guides) research, prepare and present their own programs both in Philadelphia and throughout the country," said Kathy Kupper, the park service's national spokesperson. "This practice allows the material to be fresh, not feel canned to the interpreter or the audience. They do have guidelines to go by such as the theme of the tour must be consistent with the overall goals and themes of the site, for instance at some point during the tour of Independence Hall, the ranger will let you know that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed in the building. From there, the ranger could craft his or his tour and go in several directions. A good ranger is constantly adapting the tour to fit the audience, tying in facts and ideas that can help connect that particular audience to the resource."
     Does this ever present a problem? Intellectual analysis of our history is not very popular with ... umm ... certain sections of the electorate. 
     "It's definitely received very positive reviews from all the visitors who have taken the tours," said Cowley, adding that some 3.6 million people come through the park, which includes the building where the Liberty Bell is housed, the Ben Franklin Museum, plus several other sites.

      "The National Park Service also interprets all of our history, the good and the bad and the sometimes controversial," said Kupper. "Our sites include Japanese internment camps, Pearl Harbor, cold war sites, a Confederate prisoner of war camp, battlefields, places where people were enslaved, etc. All the information provided must be accurate and properly sourced. A good tour also presents multiple points of view. However, sometimes a tour of one of these sites or a tour of any site that is particularly thought-provoking or presents different points of view might not appeal to a visitor."
    I bet. Though it certainly appealed to this visitor. 

  McKenna left us by holding up a enlargement of the sun at the back of Washington's chair, and quoting Benjamin Franklin.
     "I have often looked at that behind the president," Franklin wrote, "without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting."
     Franklin decided that it was indeed a rising sun.
     But that was 228 years ago. What about now, McKenna asked? Would you agree with Franklin? Is the American sun rising or setting?
     "What would you say to him," she asked, "and what examples would you cite?"
     That's easy. I know what I would tell Franklin, and the example I would offer: the tour I had just taken. As I was both pleased by the agriculture exhibit and doubly-pleased by the fact that the woman I married loved it too, so I was both intrigued by the issues that McKenna raised, and delighted that we live in a country where a government tour guide is free to raise them. For that alone, I side with Franklin: rising, still.

Flashback: All Summer Long

     
     Pans are more fun than praise. My column Wednesday on Leonard Pitts' new novel, "Grant Park," was hobbled by the fact it is a pretty good book. The review referred almost wistfully to another novel by another columnist—"All Summer Long" by Bob Greene. I couldn't resist the urge to dredge up my infinitely more satisfying treatment of it, which ran in the Reader 20 years ago. I loved the fact that it was presented deadpan as a review that just happened to be written by Bob's nemesis, Ed Gold, as if it weren't the latest link the clanking chain of malice that was BobWatch. The bit of publishing gossip beginning the third paragraph was possible because Bob and I shared a publisher at the time.

All Summer Long
By Bob Greene
(St. Martin's Press; $5.99)
Reviewed by Ed Gold

     There were moments while reading this unremittingly awful novel that I just wanted to close the book, turn my face to the wall, and die.
     Staring hour after hour into the Freudian cesspool of Bob Greene's psyche, delivered in a septic stream of 437 pages of predigested prose--devoid of a single metaphor, sharp image, or fresh idea--was practically a soul-shattering experience.
     All Summer Long was said to be the coveted novel that Bob extracted out of Doubleday, his pound of flesh in return for Hang Time, the highly lucrative kissy-face to Michael Jordan. The two years that passed before paperback publication, plus the novel's devolving to the inferior St. Martin's Press, point to its vanity press nature. As do the blurbs from publications such as the Cape Cod Times, the Flint Journal, and the Muskogee Phoenix and Times Democrat.

   The plot is pure Bob wish fulfillment. The thinly disguised Bob character, an aging TV journalist named Ben Kroeger, dragoons his two best friends into abandoning their families and spending "one last summer" in a journey across the country. "We had said that it was going to be the best thing we had ever done," writes Bob/Ben, as if the three men were bringing vaccines to impoverished African villages instead of lounging around motel pools.
     Bob's fake premise is further undermined by his insistence on presenting the lark as a pure, shimmering quest, a search for the grail that everyone immediately grasps and then reveres. The irony of these three boobs trying to regain the sort of magic summer now being denied their own cast-off and fatherless children never occurs to anybody, least of all the author.
     Falsity sprouts on every page. The wives of both friends have obligatory little scenes where they give their blessing to Bob/Ben. One wife, with two small children, says, "I think it's important that he gets out for a while and sees some things. . . . I want him to have this summer." The other says, "Ronnie works hard. Ronnie deserves to relax." Bob's ersatz women are fake in a way seldom seen outside pornography, but then again, so are his men. In fact, the book has only one character—Bob Greene—given different aliases and manners, but all reflecting back, hideously, to the same pulsing pathology.
     Mercifully, only a hint of the book's complete wrongness can be conveyed here. Much will be familiar to Bob readers: the scenes whose sole purpose is to recycle old columns, making patties of the regurgitated mash of past fixations—Elvis, television, baseball, television, the Beach Boys, more television. I kept waiting for Baby Richard to toddle past.
     A special warning must be added: Bob procures a love interest for himself. Mary, a 23-year-old "really beautiful" tanned athlete jogs up to Bob/Ben on the beach and breaks through his natural midwestern reserve with a fusillade of praise for his high-caliber journalism. She's hip—she listens to Taylor Dayne. She calls him "chief." They go through a high school romance, holding hands. Mary, laughing, pokes Bob/Ben playfully in the arm. Bob/Ben solemnly explains the magic of Brian Wilson.
     They hop into the sack, but not before Bob/Ben mercifully draws the veil, so to speak, as Mary is taking off her shirt and rubbing her bare chest against his. Only the numbness caused by the preceding 200 pages kept me from leaping out a window at this point, the way young men were said to do after reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.
     Heck, perhaps Bob has established a new genre here: unintentional horror. Parts of All Summer Long are as terrifying as anything Stephen King ever wrote, grotesque enough to make the most blood-drenched P.D. James novel look like Pat the Bunny.
     Read it at your own peril.