The Belgian National Railroad did a safety study, the old joke goes, and discovered that most accidents involve the last car on the train.
So they got rid of the caboose.
That isn't a very funny joke, but it is an apt one, in light of Tuesday's surprise firing of Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy. You have an understaffed, overstretched police department charged with keeping the peace in the most segregated city in the United States, in a city whose murder rate is three times that of New York City, an ossified department that has proved maddeningly resistant to reform, whose officers — surprise, surprise — reflect all the fears and prejudices found in the society as a whole, and then some. When they screw up, as humans do, they go into their duck-and-cover act, forgetting that everyone has a video camera in their phone, and they're videotaping themselves in the bargain, so lying your way through a crisis just doesn't work the way it used to.
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| Garry McCarthy |
Solution? Put a new boss on top of that!
Anyone think that replacing McCarthy with someone new will make anything better? Beyond making life better for McCarthy, that is, who now gets to lope off into the sunset to go lick his wounds as police chief of Rancho Mirage or some such garden spot, somewhere he doesn't have to listen to Rahm Emanuel scream at him twice a day. And the mayor gets to present firing McCarthy as the kind of dynamic action he likes to cite as evidence of his own endless chain of success, even though nothing at all is working for him lately, and the myth is definitely toast.
Firing McCarthy doesn't solve any of Chicago's problems. In fact, it creates three more:
Problem One: who replaces him? Someone from within the force who, weaned on the you've-got-my-back-I've-got-yours buddyism that is the air of the Chicago Police Department, knows how things work and could change them were he inclined to. But he wouldn't be; that's how he lasted so long in the first place. Anyone who has risen high enough within the CPD to be on the short list for superintendent should be excluded from consideration.
Bring in an outsider, however, and the rank and file immediately hate him, on general principles, for being an outsider and suggesting that any young cop who arrives with a gun and dream can't grow up to be superintendent. They'll resist with all their might whatever Supt. Not-From-Here tries to do even more than they'd resist someone from within trying the same thing, not that someone from within would do anything beyond symbolic chair shuffling.
That's Problem One. Problem Two: how Rahm Emanuel, whose reputation was built on his invincibility, weathers this latest humiliation and keeps from sinking into Early Onset Lame Duckism. Bad enough he was forced into a run-off with Chuy Garcia, a man who at times seemed challenged to fog a mirror. Now revivified by the smell of the mayor's blood, Garcia has reared up from his political grave to claw at the mayor. It's going to be a long three years for Emanuel. And us.
Problem Three is the real problem, underlying all this. It isn't McCarthy's fault, or Emanuel's fault or even Anita Alvarez's fault, which is really saying something, because everything is her fault. That problem is: how do we fix the grotesque undervaluing of human life that is behind the Laquan McDonald atrocity? It's as if even the public doesn't want to notice. It wasn't the 16 shots, horrible as that was, that was the most horrible part of the video. It was the cops letting the teenager lie dying in the street, unaided, uncomforted, almost unnoticed. As if he were a dog. How do we fix that? Cameras might cow cops into grudgingly doing their jobs better, although Jason Van Dyke certainly wasn't inspired to excellence. Besides, cameras break. We need a police force that knows the people they're policing, the dreaded community policing that was tried and abandoned because it costs money and officers we don't have.
The $5 million given to McDonald's family is viewed only as hush money. Anybody noticed another awful injustice: the same family that left him a ward of the state after two abuse investigations gets a giant payday at his death? You could hire a lot of cops for $5 million. And those cops could get to better know the people they're policing. And then they will be less inclined to shoot them.
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| City Hall, Philadelphia |
Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez or Mayor Rahm Emanuel. They all could quit today and I wouldn't miss any of them. Especially Rahm Emanuel. He failed to deliver the goods, and failure made him even more charmless than he was when he arrived, which is really sayin' something.
But the protesters demanding they resign, or be indicted, or whatever, are missing the point. These three don't run the show; they just pawns too, really. They step down, and three new ones step in, and what has really changed? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
The protestors saying that it is the whole system is corrupt are closer to the mark, but even they have too narrow a focus.
The thing is ...
Let's put it like this.
Everyone seemed to focus on the 16 shots Officer Jason Van Dyke pumped into Laquan McDonald. And why not? Awful to see—the vast majority of the shots first while the teen was already on the ground. Sixteen. A lot of bullets. Hard to imagine squeezing those off. Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang bang bang. Bang. Bang. Bang... There's more, but you get the idea. Can't blame a hair trigger on that.
And as awful and inexplicable as the act is, there is an even more awful part that comes later, something that is, I would argue, both even worse, and more inexplicable.
After McDonald is shot, another officer steps into the frame and kicks the teen's little knife away. Just in case the dying McDonald decides to hop up and use it. McDonald of course just lies there. None of the police officers try to help McDonald, or comfort him, or talk to him.
As if he weren't a human being, dying there in front of them.
Which is the true problem.
Think about it. You're police officers. A 17-year-old boy is dying in the street in front of you. A teen that one of your brethren shot. They all knew it was an unjustified shooting. They saw it happen. But still, none of them so much as laid a sympathetic hand on the kid, dying, in front of him.
As if he weren't a person.
Bingo. The core of the problem, one that no lopping of leaders, no amount of arm-linking in front of Michigan Avenue stores, will remedy. I could say that Van Dyke didn't view McDonald as a human being when he pumped 16 shots needlessly into him, but that unfairly puts the burden on Van Dyke's shoulders. The undervaluation of black lives goes back to the foundation of the this country; it's what slavery was based on, what Jim Crow lasted for a century because of, and whose after effects are so obvious in Chicago every single day. Blacks aren't seen as human by whites. Not really. Not all whites, of course. There are exceptions. But enough.
Do I overstate the case? I don't think so.
In their defense, whites do not have a monopoly on the practice. The undervaluing of human lives, the viewing people, not as individuals, but as fungible units of a certain group, is not an exclusive white sin, or a black one, but an affliction plaguing all people in all times, one that drives much of the sorrow and wrong of the world. Blacks certainly do it too. The idiot at University of Illinois who posted his brief threat that shut down the University of Chicago was succumbing to it when, upset about McDonald, he raged against whites he had never met online, destroying his own young life, or at least seriously sidetracking it. Imagine his next job interview, assuming he doesn't go to prison. Another future snuffed out by not holding others in the esteem they deserve, that all people deserve, at least until they demonstrate that they don't.
That's why I resist the excitement of the protests, the momentary thrill and romance. I narrow my eyes and think, "Toward what end?" They might as well be protesting gravity. What power can grant them their wish? They think every march is Selma, but if you look at the issue in Dr. King's time—the signs at his Sanitation workers strike said "I am a man"—and now, well, they're still protesting to assert the exact same thing. We believe there has been some progress, and maybe there has. But that could just be another illusion.
When we all succumb to lumping people together, to a greater or lesser degree. I just did it now, in the previous sentence, and it feels so natural we hardly notice we're doing it. The problem can't be fixed, big picture, but only addressed small picture. Society cannot change us, we have to change society. Try not to generalize so much; try to see each person as the individual he or she certainly is. It's not much of a solution, and not easy, which is why nobody demands it. But it's the only solution that can work, eventually; I don't see another.
"He's drunk!" my wife exclaimed, as we paused in the grocery's tea aisle to gaze in horror at the damage Celestial Seasonings has done to the packages of its popular herbal teas. "The bear's passed out, slumped against the jar of honey he's been guzzling."
Brand extension has hit Celestial Seasonings. The once-gently cluttered, brightly colored boxes are now awash in white space. On the shelf was one last familiar green box of "Sleepytime" tea, which I've been gulping after dinner for decades, and I pulled it over for comparison. There, the bear sat in his green chair, safe indoors, dozing before a crackling fire. A cat dozed too, a curved blue radio played, no doubt soft music.
All gone. The bear is sleeping outside, a hobo bear. He has been evicted, kicked out into the street, his chair and table too, set out on the curb, under the moon and stars.
You can compare for yourself:
I see why they did it. The new boxes are less cluttered, the word "Sleepytime" and the bear bigger, shorn of extraneous imagery. It is now "Classic Sleepytime" to differentiate from all the other brand extensions, vanilla (bleh) and peach (double bleh) and honey (for those too busy to dip a spoon in actual honey and put it in the damn tea ourselves).
Celestial Seasonings must have known people would be dubious, because "Fresh New Look" is flagged in red on the upper left of the box to tip you off that you aren't hallucinating, and aren't buying little paper baglets of chemicals, but the same blend of chamomile and spearmint, lemongrass and tilia flowers, blackberry leaves and orange blossoms that made up the herbal tea (but no actual tea, as my family learned when we toured the Celestial Seasonings plant in Boulder, for the simple reason there isn't any tea in it).
Except if you buy "Sleepytime Extra," which contains Valerian root, a folk sedative. A glimpse online shows all sorts of even more rococo Sleepytime permutations: Sleepytime Echniacea Complete Care and Sleepytime Decaf Berry Pomegranate and Sleepytime Sinus Soother. I suppose Sleepytime Bourbon is next. That's the idea behind brand extension: try to use a name you love to leverage you into buying something you don't want, plus a ploy to block out more shelf space at supermarkets.
Sighing, we stocked up on a few of the old boxes. I floated the idea of keeping them, and just refilling from the new, blanker boxes.
"That seems like work," my wife said, dubiously.
Or tins, I persisted. I seem to remember Sleepytime tins. I could root around online....
Or maybe, I realized grimly, it is time to look for a new evening tea. To be honest, the spell is broken. I buy cans of expensive loose Twinings Earl Grey tea and not some cheaper Earl Grey because I'm confident that the stuff is what I've always been drinking, and if they dubbed it EG Classic and made the box neon blue, to not be confused with EG Proustian Lime and EG Morning Blast or whatever, I would be off put. Tea is a comfort beverage—you don't amp yourself up on tea and then hit the town—and a comfort beverage should be comforting.
Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not a typical consumer. I have a certain loyalty -- Heinz ketchup not Hunts, Ritz crackers, not whatever pale rip-off imitation the store is trying to fob off on you. It's fine to shake it up, sell Ritz's in odd holiday shapes. As long as the old standby is still readily available.
Brand extensions must work on others, because companies push them enough. One aisle over from the revolution in tealand, I looked for Wheat Chex. When I was growing up, Chex came in three varieties: Wheat, Corn and Rice, the wheat in smaller boxes, because it is denser, more concentrated than Rice or Corn. But eventually I stopped buying the latter two because they just aren't as good. I almost never eat breakfast cereal: it's really fattening and leaves you hungry. And a generous bowl of Wheat Chex and skim milk tops out at about 500 calories, more than a jumbo donut. But still...sometimes you've just gotta have it.
As I gazed over the profusion of Chexes (that sounds wrong; "Chex" must be both singular and plural, like "fish") I realized, to my horror, that they had chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and clusters, even something called "Honey Nut." Everything but Wheat.
Maybe that's what goes in the empty space on the lower shelf.
Yes, I realize the carnival of indignity that is aging, that the world is not skewed in your direction anymore and the stuff you care about is revealed as irrelevant idiocy. To marketers, we 55 and older might as well be dead, except for a nether world of adult undergarments and denture creams and such. Companies have to evolve to stay in business. Someday there will be Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Pot Brew and 30 other sub-varieties and I'll point out that it used to be just one, plain old Sleepytime tea, to my grandchildren who will shrug. "Whatever gramps," they'll say, not even looking up from their electronic devices, taking all their nutrition in the form of a thick beige liquid sucked from a catheter tube.
These changes are a double minor shock: first you feel bad that they happened, then you feel even worse for feeling bad they happened, for being that small and nostalgic a person. And for me, I guess, a triple shock, because I also feel bad that I bothered to tell you about it. To be frank, I'm sorry I brought it up.
Editor's note: Six months after this post, Celestial Seasonings announced it was returning to the old box. While I would never be so brash as to suggest those two events are somehow connected, cause and effect, I like to think I was part of the chorus of complaint that prompted the company to reverse its folly.
Erring on the side of caution usually has good connotations.
Buying some extra insurance.
Tucking a flashlight in the glove compartment.
But college campuses, which magnify and concentrate our social flaws, have made caution a sickness, with their trigger alerts and manifestos of victimhood. They seem to think their job is to prepare the real world for students, and not the other way around.
So the FBI notices an online threat directed at the University of Chicago, informs the school, and in response the entire place shuts down Monday as a result. Classes canceled, students urged to stay indoors and, oh I don't know, cower.
Have we lost our minds?
Does the FBI have any idea how easy it is to post those online threats? How closing the school is the kind of wild overreaction that inspires mopes to do this kind of thing in the first place, and responding in such an extreme way only invites more threats? We don't pay ransoms to terrorists holding American hostages overseas, even at the cost of their lives, because we know that doing so only makes the situation worse. Yet one of the world's great intellectual institutions grinds to a halt tomorrow because somebody typed something mean?
Maybe there's more here than meets the eye. Maybe the FBI has some intelligence about a real danger, as opposed to some random threat. If so, they didn't mention that.
So much for safe spaces. For a cynical society, we can be shockingly naive. The New York Times Magazine ran a story Sunday about "swatting," the practice of online pranksters sending SWAT teams crashing in on the unsuspecting. It's jaw-droppingly easy, and an indictment of our reactive, militarized police force that some disturbed teenager in Vancouver could dispatch armies of cops across the country at his whim. It's so easy to do, you can barely blame the juvenile, and law enforcement was slow to respond -- to him, not when sending in the heavy artillery—until he had done it dozens of times.
We live in a dangerous time, but then we always have, one way or another. The question always is, what do we do about it? Do we give in to fear? Or do we resist? Do we go about our business despite the risks? The adults need to show more discretion. We need cooler heads that will understand that crouching in fear doesn't solve anything. If a person actually intended to shoot up the campus Monday, they wouldn't warn the students away. When does that ever happen? Such threats are the empty acts of brainlessness or unbalance. Which also explains the University of Chicago's reaction.
The New York Times served up a front page story Saturday "Foul-Mouthed And Proud of It On the '16 Trail," about how the herd of Republican presidential candidates are swearing far more than has ever been previously heard in public from those who would occupy the White House.
The words that shocked us when Nixon muttered them on transcripts of the White House tapes more than 40 years ago are now being blithely tossed out to crowds that cheer instead of gasp.
Not that the Times said that. Or quoted any of the actual words being used by these candidates. Not directly. Campaigning may have changed, but journalism has not, alas, not enough, and being what is still called "a family newspaper" by the few who refer to newspapers at all, the Times did not reproduce the words and phrases it was writing about, falling back on a variety of stale euphemisms and twee winks. Thus Rand Paul calling any trade-off between liberty and security "bullshit" was rendered strangely as "'bull' before adding a syllable" and Mario Rubio called something "'political B.S. without the abbreviation." The article vaguely referred to "four-letter words," "dirty words," "provocative remarks" and my favorite, "saltiness."
Let me guess. When you read "bullshit" in the paragraph above, your hands did not fly to your cheeks as you uttered a tiny, "Oh my!" People who get worked up over obscenity, I have found, tend to be residents of small towns, blinking at the larger world as if they've never seen it before. A lot of stuff upsets them.
Odd to cater to isolated small-town naifs as your target audience. Only a few weeks ago, the Times felt justified including a chunky virtual reality viewing device with the Sunday paper. Given that expensive and probably fruitless effort, you'd think that expanding their permitted vocabularies to include a few common words most adults hear and utter every day, in conversation and on-line, would be a no-brainer.
But like network television, newspapers linger in the fading past, allowing themselves to be held prisoner by a tiny coterie of complainers.
The Times speculates as to why so many curse words are being heard. Aping Donald Trump for starters — though no obscene word could touch the obscenity of the thoughts being expressed, which are also parroted widely. Or perhaps "a play for machismo ... a signal of vitality, rawness, a willingness to break through the din."
I think that last reason was why I named this blog "Every goddamn day" — to stick out from the clutter while expressing a sense of who I am and what it is this thing is supposed to do.
When the blog was in its early days I got the occasional complaint. Now the only difficulty is self-generated, in conversation, through an excess of politeness. I sometimes find myself blushing to actually utter it -- I was talking Saturday with a bright young member of a Baptist church, preparing an apartment in West Rogers Park for some Burmese refugees arriving later in the week. We were talking about the national mood regarding refugees, and I suggested she read a certain column I had written on the topic, and since the Sun-Times web site is so, ah, problematic, I said she could look it up on my personal blog, "Every ... er... every gah..." and then gently explained the whole genesis of the name. She smiled and seemed to understand—the young are not as easily rattled as we older folks sometimes suspect.
To be honest, as much as I value the right to use more risque words, where appropriate, I would feel a bit threatened if they fell into wide use and general acceptability, because that would rob them of their surprise and power. When every candidate for comptroller is promising to wipe away the bullshit, when every toddler is shrieking "fuh you, Billy!" as they wrestle over a sippy cup, then David Mamet plays will lose a little of their oomph, and my darts will be blunted.
The great William Safire, once the Times' resident wordsmith, now sunk in obscurity, includes an entry on "God damn" in his 1980 "On Language." After slyly bragging that Frank Sinatra insulted him, quoting the singer telling the UPI, "William Safire is a goddamn liar," Safire mourns the merging of the two words into one and, idiosyncratically, decries the final "n" on "damn," which he'd like to remove for two nonsensical reasons: "it's not pronounced anyway" and because, since nothing is being damned, it's more a "whoop of admiration or exasperation."
Yet he titles the entry, "God damn," a head-scratching example of a writer failing to adopt the practice even as he urges it upon others.
Obviously no one listened to Safire, who was laboring under the illusion that star journalists often succumb to: that they're actually directing the river we're all being carried along in.
The UPI, Safire mentions, urged "goddamn ... should not be used at all unless there is a compelling reason."
I consider catching attention, projecting edginess, and shooing away the overly pious, all compelling reasons. I hope the Republican presidential candidates are not signaling a general approval of what the Times would call "potty talk," and that their electoral defeat will reverse the trend they started, assuming they've started a trend, and don't exist in some separate cultural hell reserves for candidates. The politicians can have "bullshit"—it suits them—but I hope they'll leave "goddamn," with its mix of wonder and grumpiness, to me.
"Lord, thank you," Thomas Lux once ended a poem, gloriously, "for the goddamn birds singing!" Exactly.
I can't honestly say I miss the Saturday Fun Activity—for any newcomers, a perennial contest where I try to stump readers with a photo of an enigmatic location, inevitably fail and then have to send somebody a prize. But when I saw this enormous painting my first thought was: Wow, that would be a fun Fun Activity.
Except of course for the Internet, where plugging "Big Chicago moose blowing bubble painting" into Google leads you, immediately, to discover that this is Moose Bubblegum Bubble, a work from the "We Are Animals" series by Chicago photo-illustrator Jacob Watts. The image won an artistic competition last year, and is on display on a wall at Columbia College, 33 E. Congress.
At which point I was going to shrug and do something else. But then I realized that the gigantic moose is in itself interesting, if you haven't seen it before, which I hadn't. No contest necessary. It is an example of the rare piece of public art that I actually like, which sets Jacob Watts apart from such artists as Jean Dubuffet and Alexander Calder. The thing has whimsy, and there just isn't enough whimsy to go around, particularly not of late. Self-importance we've got up the ying-yang, and the aforementioned Dubuffet and Calder have cornered the market on twee lumpish pointlessness. But surprise, charm, and I suppose a certain placidity? That deserves note. The moose is not an especially placid animal compared to, say, a cow. Perhaps that's a result of the big pink bubble. Anyway, if you haven't seen it before, now you have.
The state of Illinois is cracked. Our government is broken and no one can fix it. Our leaders bicker and squabble and waste day after day after day. We can't approve a budget, never mind balance one. The figures are astronomical: Illinois has a public worker pension obligation of $111 billion dollars.
That's equal to the gross national product of Morocco.
The politicians are rigid, unyielding. Gov. Bruce Rauner and House Speaker Michael Madigan are twin bookends: grim, rigid, lipless men, holding firm while the state slides further and further to hell. Rahm Emanuel seems increasingly irrelevant, like the form of a man far away in the distance, silhouetted against the horizon. But you can't blame them because they've had so much help, from all the politicians in the past. They signed a check we couldn't cash, then skedaddled. And we let them.
The problem is so complex, so enormous, spanning decades, billions of dollars, thousands of employees. Often the mind just wants to reject it. There's no point in keeping track because nothing happens anyway. It just somehow keeps getting worse and worse. The more they try to fill the hole, the deeper it becomes. It's a puzzle, a conundrum; who can make sense of it?
And then suddenly the whole problem presents itself in front of you in a clear and unmistakeable fashion.
I was waiting for my wife to get off work at the Attorney General's office one Friday late last month, standing in front of the Thompson Center, Helmut Jahn's elephantine salmon and baby blue monstrosity, which the state is in the process of selling off because, as I mentioned, we're broke.
And as I stood waiting — she takes her work very seriously, and would no sooner leave before 5 p.m. than she would steal reams of copy paper — I glanced down, at the tableau below. The stone slabs in front of the building had cracked, no doubt from shoddy construction and years of neglect, and someone had slapped a strip of silver duct tape over a crack.
You can see how well that worked.
I had noticed duct tape used in the building before—in the governor's office, embarrassingly. Visitors to the governor of Illinois find themselves in a waiting room where the threadbare, 40 year old carpet is ripped and patched with duct tape.
That's bad, but this repair out front on the public sidewalk was worse, because at least the duct tape on the thin carpets worked. Some state employee — or perhaps one of the contract employees we hired to do what we can no longer do — saw the crack and thought, "Better slap some duct tape on that one." A half-assed half measure that didn't half work. An oozing bandage poorly applied over our gaping civic wound.
Isn't that the story of the state of Illinois? How can we be afraid of terrorists striking us when we so effectively strike at ourselves? Our creaky government entities collapsing around us, our public roads crumbling, our bridges coming down on our heads. Where was the pride of the guy in a blue coveralls kneeling down and yanking off a strip of duct tape, perhaps nipping it with his teeth before he tore off a strip, pressing it down upon the stone? Where is the pride of we who pass it? Illinois is a laughingstock, the sick man of the United States, on the bottom of the pile. How could we allow it? How can we? We plan meticulously to face disasters that may never come, while our own self-created disaster gets worse and worse, swelling before our eyes in broad daylight. We keep not doing what we have to do, fighting over who gets a bigger slice of a pie that's crumbling away into nothing. Our leaders fail us, but then that's apt, because we fail ourselves, eyes wide open, every hour of every day.
