My name is Neil Steinberg and I'll be your teacher

     Yesterday was April 1, and so, before we begin, apologies to those loyal readers who were fooled, even upset by my post announcing the end of the blog. I tried to drop enough giveaway clues in it, and succeeded too well, for those who thought the gag was obvious, and not well enough for those who were genuinely deceived. But in general it seemed to be enjoyed by most, and certainly caused some discussion, which is the point of these.
     I almost forgot that I also had a column in the paper Friday, also tied to a certain day — April 1 was the day the Chicago Teachers Union went on their one-day, ill-advised strike. This column also caused a bit of fuss, of a more serious nature, and I thought today being Saturday, I'd slip it in for those who missed it in the paper (and you know who you are!)


     Good morning class.
     Settle down, please. There's room for a few hundred of you in the front: the little kids, please.
     I know there's a lot of us here — 330,000 Chicago Public Schools students, shut out of school Friday due to the one-day teachers union strike.
     Which means the teachers will be walking picket lines, and you'll be, well, somewhere. Hundreds of schools and churches will open their doors, and you might go there to get out of harm's way. Though I'd imagine a good number of you are parked on the sofa at home, killing time as only kids can.
     So forgive me for intruding. I thought I'd try to shoehorn a little education into your day. You can play Call of Duty: Black Ops III all afternoon.
     So, hello, I'm Mr. Steinberg.
     I did pause to ask myself whether this makes me a scab — “scab” is a historic labor term for someone who undermines a strike. The Chicago Teachers Union announced it is monitoring school entrances, threatening to fine any teacher who goes to work today. This was necessary, as opposed to the choir of solidarity that greeted the 2012 strike because, well, times have changed. In four years the economies of Illinois and Chicago have gone from menacing to calamitous, and the union pushing to the front of the line, well, it sparks mixed feelings.
     So flexibility being a survival skill in unions nowadays, I can be a proud member of the Communications Workers of America and still instruct what few students actually drop their eyes upon this today. I’m not on strike.

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The end

     Well, we all saw this day coming, didn't we? 
     At least in recent months.
     Last summer, true, when the blog was clicking along at up to 5,000 hits a day, with some months nearing 100,000 hits, I told myself it would just go up and up, on and on, forever.
     But then, well, it seems people got tired of reading this every goddamn day. To be honest, I got tired of writing it. And while it was amusing to write for thousands of readers, a growing swarm, with praiseful write-ups in Robert Feder's column and the Beachwood Reporter, not to mention the good $10,000 a month or more I was pulling in on blog advertisements, it is something else entirely to write for a couple hundred people a day, with the only income a couple bucks from those pesky pop-up erectile dysfunction ads.
     Frankly, it's just pathetic.  So I'm done.
     Not that it hasn't been a good run. I was proud when Ubilabs named this blog one of "100 Things to Watch in 2011." And excited to have commentators who ranged from John Kass's cousin to Carol Mosley-Braun. Not to mention to create a written legacy of first rate, or at least very good second rate, literary journalism that will glow online like a beautiful radioactive flower until the end of time, or until Google shuts down its servers, whichever comes first. 
    I want to go out on top. Or near the top. Or at least when the top is still a memory, sort of.
    This is goodbye, but not farewell.  You can still read me five days a week in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Me (far right) playing with Eric Zorn's Good Time
  Bluegrass Ramblers.

   In closing, I want to thank you all, you readers, or what readers remain anyway, for sticking with me through the thick and the thin. Thank you for the comments, and for the baked goods. To be honest, I'm looking forward to putting the time that was devoted to writing this blog to more productive pursuits. As you may know, I've taken up the four-string folk mountain harmonium—it's like a banjo—and have been rehearsing with Eric Zorn's Good Time Bluegrass Ramblers, exploring the rich heritage of 1930s Appalachian music. We'll be performing regularly at the Thursday clog dance recitals at the Old Town School of Folk Music—you can check out the schedule here.
     Such farewells should be short. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope to see all of you at our Old Town gigs. Bring your dancing clogs! 

    Best,

    Neil Steinberg

Donald Trump does backflips on abortion

     So Donald Trump, the, ah, front-running Republican presidential candidate, er, now, in the year 2016, said Wednesday ... that would be March 30, again of 2016, that ... ah ... women, who have abortions, after he is elected president of course, illegal abortions, since he, Donald Trump, once elected president, will make abortions illegal through some alchemy that somehow eluded the lesser talents of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,  Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. 
     That those women, who still have an abortion, despite their no longer being legal, under the presidency of Donald Trump, will certainly be punished, in some way, for having that illegal procedure, though whether that punishment is through a fine, or prison or, heck, this is Donald Trump we're talking about here, whether by stripping the woman naked and drawing and quartering her in DuPont Circle, well, he didn't quite say. 
     "There has to be some form of punishment," Trump told Chris Matthews on MSNBC. 
     Moot now anyway. It took him only hours to backpedal away from his call for punishment — being Donald Trump means that nothing that comes out of your mouth carries such weight that it can't be retracted, contradicted or amended as need be. No, it is the doctors who should be punished. The women, being women, are not responsible for their actions, are the victims of abortion, along with their murdered babies....
    Don't trust me on this. His campaign statement said:
     "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb."
     A reminder of two key points. First, that pro-lifers, or anti-abortionists, or whatever they call themselves, are really about controlling women. They say abortion is "murder"—that's the the word they use over and over and over—but hesitate at the well-then-put-the-murderer-in-jail-then part of their argument, because they really don't mean it. It's just words they say trying to get you to bend to their religion.
     And two, Donald Trump is so never going to be president. Not in a world where people are paying attention. At least I hope not. You do have to wonder, with states from Indiana to Texas hacking away big chunks of reproductive rights, whether women actually are paying attention. They should be, because they sure as hell have been warned. We all have been.

IMAN Green ReEntry rebuilds homes, lives

Rashid Grant, 38, who spent 20 years in prison for murder, rehabbing a home in Chicago Lawn as part of Green ReEntry, a program of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.

     Last September, Jack Appleton, 62, was living in a shelter, looking for work. The search wasn’t going well, thanks to one aspect of his career that sticks out on a resume: 13 years in prison for bank robbery.
     “Most people don’t even want to talk to you,” Appleton said. “I just was looking for a chance.”
     Jack Appleton’s chance finally came.
     “I had just got out of Pekin, and was looking for a job and a place to stay,” he continued, pausing Monday morning from work rehabbing a brick bungalow on Fairfield just off West 63rd Street in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. “I heard from word of mouth about IMAN.”
     IMAN is the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a nonprofit organization designed to strengthen bonds between black and Muslim Chicagoans. IMAN’s programs include a medical clinic, outreach to store owners, and Green ReEntry, which helps the recently incarcerated get work experience and housing. We expect felons who have served their time not to return to jail, yet few employers are willing to risk hiring them. Green ReEntry not only helps them, but their community too.

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This is why the Republicans lose

     This is why the Republicans lose. Because you cannot stop time. It moves, forward, relentlessly, whether you like it or not.
     Oh, you can try. You can block nomination of a new Supreme Court justice to replace the deceased Antonin Scalia, out of the patently-offensive notion that Barack Obama no longer represents the will of the people in the last year of his term. You can announce that the court will just have to wait for that 9th justice. You can do that.
     But the Supreme Court still hears cases. And the 4-4 deadlock announced Tuesday means that the lower appeals court ruling in Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association stands, denying the lawsuit by a group of California teachers who argued that forcing them to pay union dues was a violation of their 1st Amendment rights.
     The irony is, had Congress done its duty and approved Obama's choice, Merrick Garland, he very well might have sided with the conservatives. We'll never know, will we?
    Thanks Mitch McConnell. You can't hold back time. It squeezes around you and moves forward with or without your approval. 

At least he didn't say 'Work will make you free."

     "My policy is America first," Donald Trump told Fox News Monday, "and will always be, America first."
     "America first."
     Really?
     Though anyone in the least bit historically-minded is already cowering in a paroxysm of disbelief, watching this presidential campaign in open-mouthed, Edvard Munch-strength horror, Trump's words have to send a new shiver across our blown-out sensibilities. 
    The America First Committee, the bund of isolationists and Hitler boot lickers that thrived for a year before Pearl Harbor, funded by xenophobes like Robert McCormick, starring sieg-heiling erstwhile hero Charles Lindbergh. It fought to make sure America was as unprepared for war as it could be, under the charmed notion that Herr Hitler and his allies would leave us alone as long as we didn't antagonize them.  Trumpeting safety, it endangered the country, leaving us vulnerable.  
     FDR, whom they loathed, warned them.
     "Let no one imagine that America will escape," he told Chicagoans during a visit in 1937, "that American may expect mercy, that this Western hemisphere won't be attacked."
      This is exactly what Trump et al believe. If we bar immigrants and refugees, we can somehow keep terrorists at bay. It is a theory that imagines all bad things hovering outside our borders. All we have to do is not let them in. When the truth is far more complicated. 
     I can't even insinuate that Trump intended the reference as a dog whistle to his terrified rabble of followers. Even if he weren't ignorant of the past, his supporters certainly are—a chunk of America doesn't even know there was a World War II, never mind sweating the home-front details—and only resent when the obvious parallels between Trump and Hitler are pointed out: the stoking of support based on demonizing already-scorned minorities, the barely suppressed—so far—calls to violence.  
     You really should watch the Fox News clip where Trump says it. They play a snippet of Barack Obama suggesting we should let more refugees in. Then they cut to Trump, who reflexively wildly-exaggerates what Obama has said into talk about "open borders" as if Obama had invited the world in. As if they really don't know that America's current refugee policy is a profile in cowardice. Our country has let a couple thousand Syrian refugees in the past year, while Europe has welcomed millions.  Even if terrorists were among them, pointing to terrorist acts as an argument against immigration is like pointing toward a car wreck as an argument for a 10 mph speed limit.
      Haters see risk in the things they already hate. They can't grasp the risk of America turning its back on its values, on the thing that made us a great nation to begin with, not to mention providing the grease our economy needs to work. They don't see the harm of being a ghetto of white ignorance that feeds the phenomenon in the first place. 
    Perhaps the most galling thing about Trump is that he is not alone. His success is due to his shouting things the GOP has been whispering for years. While Trump is acting as the Harold Hill of haters, high-stepping toward the White House with trombones at full blare, the House of Representatives passed HR 4731 out of committee Monday. The "Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act,"  would reduce and cap our already minuscule refugee admissions, allowing timid state and local governments to opt out of letting any refugees in at all. 
      This isn't "America First." This is "Fear First."

Playboy: not many sexy pictures, but lots of Don Cheadle

     When I heard that Playboy is for sale — its supposed worth, about $500 million — my first, unvarnished thought was: "Who's going to buy the magazine? I wouldn't buy a copy of the magazine."
     Last fall, when Playboy announced that they would no longer publish nudity, I wasn't even curious. Who cares? The world has hurtled past them.
     Now I realized that journalistic rigor demands I get my hands on an issue. Look at the thing. They used to send them free to the newspaper, where the fat brown envelopes, with discreet "PEI" — Playboy Enterprises Inc. — return addresses, would stack up, unopened. Life is just too short to browse $10,000 stereos and endless variations on the same pneumatic airbrushed babe.
     No more. I felt a trickle of dread at the thought of buying Playboy. There's still a whiff of shame associated with buying pornography.
     Tried the 7-Eleven at Franklin and Lake. The magazine rack had Maxim—the bawdy lad mag that kneecapped Playboy. The store also had the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, eating Playboy's lunch.
     No Playboy. Hidden behind the counter? No.
     Ditto for the CVS on Madison. Scientific American but no Playboy.
     The newsstand at Union Station carries it. At the register, I babbled to the clerk that this copy is for research.
     "There are many varieties online," she replied, enigmatically. "Do you want a bag?"
     "God yes," I exclaimed.
     Safely at home, I looked at it.
     Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
     The cover is matte, not glossy. A model wearing a pale blue bra, her hands braced behind her hips, pelvis thrust forward, hair in her face, a flash photograph that has the feel of a snapshot of your older sister taken at Wisconsin Dells in 1974.
     One hundred and six pages, total. Five pages of Playboy product ads—bunny logo baseball caps, Playboy cologne. Marketing is what keeps Playboy afloat, supposedly.
     Two photo spreads. The first, shot by Molly Steele "celebrated for her serene images of nature." Half a dozen of perhaps the most un-erotic photos ever to appear in a magazine not dedicated to dentistry. The third particularly sticks out: a woman in a lake, her head resting on her hand as if supremely bored, her face blocked by a brown clump of weeds. In the last, she clutches a sheet, tongue lolling out, no doubt intending to invoke Miley Cyrus, but more an expression of nausea. I can't imagine a horny 15-year-old boy would find interest in any of them.
     The second set, of Miss April, Camille Row, are a little better. Playboy centerfolds used to be shot in swank Victorian mansions; now, framed against beige shag carpets and goldenrod curtains, which I'm sure struck the Playboy editors as raw and real, but just looked tired. I showed the centerfold to my wife and she said, "That's not a flattering picture."
     There are articles—an interview with actor Don Cheadle, a short story, candidly titled "Insipidities," I soldiered through the tale, and could criticize it, but am too grateful to see fiction in a magazine in 2016. It brought to mind Samuel Johnson's quip, "the remarkable thing is not that it's done well, but that it's done at all."
     Which might be an epithet for Playboy. Nobody who works for a publication can take pleasure at its decline—we're all cooking in the same pot—and Playboy is as Chicago as the stockyards. Hugh Hefner, a proud graduate of Steinmetz High School, created it right here.
     But the first obligation of anyone intruding upon the public's attention is to be interesting, and, while acknowledging that I am not the target audience, I just couldn't see anything in the April Playboy—not one thing—that justifies tracking it down and paying $8. Maybe if you are really, really interested in Don Cheadle. But even then. Plug "Interview with Don Cheadle" into Google and nearly half a million hits come up.