Really important people show up for the bris

     Politics has become such a free fire zone, the tendency is to blast away at everything, big or small, without any sense of balance. Thus Hillary Clinton can be assailed for a policy statement, for something her husband did 20 years ago, for her relationship with Wall Street banks, and her smile, all in the same breath, all with the same vigor, as if those were all equivalent. 

     I try not to do that. Given Donald Trump's utter unfitness for president in thought, word and deed, between his preying upon the darkest impulses in the submerged American psyche and his tacit union with xenophobes of all stripes, who cares whether his wife posed for risque fashion shots or that his hands are tiny? Why traffic in trivialities?

    So it is not significant that the man skipped his own grandson's bris to campaign. If the three marriages don't show that Trump doesn't hold family life in high regard, nothing will. Though the delicious irony that Trump has the White Supremacist vote locked up; the existence of his Jewish grandkid must be one of the many things they don't know. Reading a story laying out the whole situation—Brisgate, we'll call it—it struck me that the average, non-Jewish reader might not get the significant of brises, something that I explained back in the 1990s, when I hosted a pair. 

     Elsewhere in the paper today, my colleague Jim Ritter has a calm, sober look at the current state of the art of medical thinking regarding the practice of circumcision.
     Poor guy.
     I wish I could have gotten to him beforehand and warned him: Jim, buddy, don't do this. Listen to me, the voice of experience. Write a story about podiatry.
     You see, I, too, wrote a story about circumcision, about 10 years ago. And have found myself, ever since then, placed on the mailing list of NO-CIRC, the California group that feels circumcision is the greatest atrocity visited upon mankind since the Romans crucified slave rebels along the Appian Way.
     So every quarter, for the past decade, the NO-CIRC newsletter lands in my mailbox. It's an arresting document, filled with tales of botched circumcisions, of doctors who now see the light, of men declaring their lives ruined by circumcision (they speak of not being "complete"). There are all sorts of heretofore unimagined practices, such as submitting to reconstructive surgery to have the little bit put back.
     I should be strong and just pitch the newsletter out, unread. But that would take a more solid will than my own. Curiosity always gets the better of me, and I need to flip through it, marveling that what is for me and everyone I've ever met a forgotten bit of surgical business buried deep in our unremembered pasts is, for these people, a defining wrong and peerless crime they set their lives to fighting.
     Hope you enjoy it, Jim, because they've got your number now.
     Of course, I'm biased. Circumcision is one of my people's rituals. Eight days after a boy is born, you get everybody over to the house. A mohel—or rabbi trained to do the deed—shows up, puts on a little show, does a few deft slices, and then everyone breaks out the Crown Royal.
     I've hosted two bris ceremonies in the past three years and would love to host another, if the opportunity arrives. They're fun. True, there is a certain anxiety among the male guests, who tend to whistle silently, their hands folded in front of them, protectively. They stare with sudden interest at the light fixtures while the act itself is being performed.
     But the newborn boys, snockered on Manischevitz sucked off a piece of gauze, took it like, well, men. A little crying, and then back to normal. Maybe they'll hate me someday for it and join NO-CIRC, but I sort of doubt it.
     And the ceremony had meaning to me. Not so much the ageless covenant going back to Abraham, an unbroken chain from Chicago leading to the sands of the Sinai Desert. No, what I found most amazing was that people showed up. A bris has to be done at a set time - eight days after the birth, during the day. Which means that it is rarely conveniently scheduled. People don't come out on a Tuesday morning because they want to watch a surgical procedure and grab a free bagel. They come out because, I assume, they care about you, they're proud you've had a boy and want to share in it.
     A good thought. I concluded, after the two bris rites, that as a general rule the people who took the time to attend were the people I was going to expend energy worrying about. Several times, when faced with a friend's less-than-friendlike behavior, I comforted myself with the thought, "Heck, they didn't come to the bris—what did I expect?"

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 2, 1999

Hugh Hefner, advocate for family values

     Today is Hugh Hefner's 90th birthday. The Playboy founder has long been in California, but was born and raised in Chicago, started Playboy on the kitchen table of his Harper Avenue apartment, and ran his empire here until the mid-1970s.
     Some people are captivated by Hef. I am not one of those people. I always shared the opinion of Mike Royko, who once wrote:

     He is the world's most over-rated playboy. In fact, I'm not sure that Hefner is a playboy. He seems to be as middle-class as the people he criticizes in his giggle-giggle philosophy.

      Bingo. Not that there's anything WRONG with being middle-class. I certainly am. Still, I don't pretend to be the avatar of sophistication, which Hefner certainly did. Nor do I suggest that crass commercialism and unexamined carnality amounts to the nine-fold path to enlightenment. 
     That said, he was a personage of significance, no doubt about that. In this 2000 column, I found myself at one of his parties, and thought I'd share the experience, such as it was, to mark his birthday.

     The principal of Queen of Peace High School phoned. Could I, she asked, come to their event on Monday?
      Gee, I said, I'd love to, but I'm going to Hugh Hefner's party. He's showing off his twin girlfriends, Sandy and Mandy.
     I could have just said, "Sorry, I'm busy." But I provided details, succumbing to the shameful braggadocio that sends people to such parties in the first place. Look at me! I was saying. I'm big and important!
     Within such pride are the seeds of its own punishment. Having bragged about going, when Monday night came, I had to actually go.
     That cuts across my core personality, which is to rush home each night and read Hop on Pop. First, I'm a tired guy, I like to rest. Second, when I go out, I avoid crowds. Why risk having your elbow jostled? Third, I have the most persuasive lobbyist in the world working on me not to linger downtown, in the form of a 2-year-old on the phone saying wistfully, "You come home fwum work now?"
     But Hugh Hefner? The man is an icon. What guy doesn't cast a long, envious look at the life Hefner has had? Rich. Famous. All the babes in the world.
     My wife thought I was going to ogle the centerfolds. But really I was going to ogle Hefner.
     That view is not shared by all. The principal, for instance, surprised me by expressing disdain. Why, she asked, her voice registering part wonder, part icy disgust, would you want to go there?
     I've met the principal, and like her, and was a little embarrassed to be caught bragging about something so clearly loathsome to her. Her displeasure hovered above me and kept me from joining in the easy dismissal of those protesting naming a street in honor of Hefner.
     At first, the protest seems like a time warp, just for the terms used: "pornography," "provincialism," even that hoary 1920s chestnut, "free love."
     It is easy to forget that the mainstream of America is a very conservative place. The fact is that sex and nudity send a big chunk of America screaming for the exits, and as fun as it is for hip urbanites such as ourselves to smirk at them, many people feel that the entire Playboy philosophy is grotesque and damaging to family life.
     They're wrong, of course. Hugh Hefner has done more to foster family values than anybody. His party, for instance, was one long infomercial for being married and spending your nights at home playing Scrabble.
     About 500 people packed into a dimly lit room. Unidentifiable techno disco wumping out of big speakers. Hef and three or four identical, improbably constructed women, the twins apparently among them, somehow transported through the crowd and placed on a raised podium surrounded by a nose-high wall. On tiptoe, you could just see them.
     "Watch Hef dance!" a media pal urged. I gazed over the wall. Hef danced like my Uncle Max, his hands in little fists, feet planted, shoulders waggling happily for about 10 seconds.
     Later, I tried to ascend to the empyrean to greet him, but was rebuffed. Having shown off to a high school principal, I was punished by being told to go stand with the other supernumeraries in the crowd scene.
     My wife—her mind addled by love—had actually worried that I would become lovestruck by some Playboy centerfold and hie away with her to California. But in reality, such women are more anatomical curiosities than lust objects; closer to giraffes than people.
     Frankly, the next morning, ears ringing, stomach uneasy, I realized, too late, that I would have had more fun at Queen of Peace High School, reminded yet again of the essential fact missed by both critics and defenders of Playboy: It's an illusion, harmful only to those who seek it out in reality.
            —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 13, 2000

Gay Talese takes us inside "The Voyeur's Motel"

Gay Talese

     My use of the word "incredible" to describe Gay Talese's book "The Voyeur's Motel" in this column turned out to be prescient. When it was published in late June, journalists more rigorous than myself poked holes in his accounts, and Talese renounced the whole thing.  It sucks to get old.

     When I’m 84, I just hope to be somewhere. Sitting on a comfortable chair in the sun, perhaps, plaid wool lap rug neatly tucked, flipping through Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and someone to bring a fresh cup of tea. Sign me up right now.
     The thought of being Gay Talese, 84 and at the very top of his game, roiling the media world two, maybe three, different ways in the span of a week, well, it’s unimaginable.
     And no, I don’t mean the Twitstorm over his telling a crowd at Boston University on April 1 that, as a young man, he wasn’t inspired by female reporters. That’s called candor, and the shriek rising up from the Internet is only news because we’re still accustoming ourselves to it. It’s too omnipresent and witless to have actual value, and someday will be seen not as news so much as similar to how we view the writing inside toilet stalls: a trivial element of modern life of interest only to those who find themselves directly before it.
     No, I mean his article, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” in the April 11 New Yorker.  An incredible story, leaving behind important questions, something they’ll discuss in journalism schools 50 years from now (assuming, of course, there are journalism schools 50 years from now) the way we’re still talking about Talese’s profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 50 years ago this month in Esquire (the anniversary being Talese’s third source of notoriety this week)....

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A luxury they will never enjoy

     Hmm.
     Now Tuesday was a really good day. Got to work with a pocket full of nothing, true, but came up with a column about the minimum wage that I wasn't embarrassed to pass on to the editor. Jumped on the Blue Line to Wicker Park. Popped into Myopic Books, one of the great used book stores left in Chicago. Had lunch at my new favorite place, Dove's on Damen, bumped into my pal, Tony Fitzpatrick, the artist, sitting right next to me. Talked about Rahm Emanuel circling the drain. A good time.
     Just as I got home news broke about the governor of Mississippi announcing that, envious of the scorn being heaped on North Carolina, his state too had passed its own ridiculous law making it easy for the state's wasp's nest of haters to use their religion as a pretext to snub and harass gay people who try to patronize their stores, to buy flowers or cakes for their weddings, as if those stores were places of public accommodation in a capitalist society called the United States of America and not religious relic stalls at some market in a medieval village in Upper Slovakia.
     "Is this the hill to die on?" my kids' elementary school principal would ask, when some particularly nugatory bit of nonsense was being fluffed into A Big Honkin' Issue. Apparently yes, since it seems the whole wheel of Christianity turns upon scorn for gay marriage. Who knew?

   Why should bowl-haircut state legislators South of the Mason-Dixon line be allowed to make a fuss about regular American citizens going peacefully about their business, and get no flack back in return? It's deeply satisfying that a company like PayPal fled North Carolina in revulsion. Such courage must be emulated.  I pursed my lips, pulled a picture of some black-clad ISIS group off the Internet, and Tweeted it with this line: "Someone should tell Mississippi that 'sincerely held religious beliefs' really isn't much of an excuse any more."
      I thought it clever, and others agreed — it was retweeted nearly 200 times, with 300 "likes." I went to watch the Bulls game, satisfied that my small role in flying the flag for liberty and justice for all in the United States had been fulfilled.
     By Wednesday, however, well, not such a good day. The motley bund of haters and white supremacists—whoops, excuse me, "race realists"— sulking down in Mississippi began to stir, sniff the air, and mobilize themselves. They cannily deduced, by my name, that I'm a Jew — no slipping anything past these folks — a parasite on my "host" country. 
     Twitter lit up.
     "omg a jew doing jew stuff I'm so surprised omg" wrote something calling itself Ferric Jaggar. Jew stuff? Really? Maybe that's why they call it Twitter; all these twits. How to respond to that? Start by considering the source. Silence would be ideal—what purpose is served by responding?— but it's so tempting to try. I tweeted back: "I assume by 'jew stuff' you mean 'thinking.' Yeah, it's fun, you ought to try it sometime. It's how we stay ahead." For all the good it did. Immediately others were waving it around --see, see? I was claiming that Jews are better than Christians? (Well, umm, this particular one is, at the moment here, compared to morons like you, yeah, I'll stand by that.) 
    Soon it was coming fast and furious. I lost count. Dozens. Scores.
    "What about Israel?" others chimed in. What about the Orthodox view on intermarriage? You could see their logic shining through, like the spine of a tadpole. Of course the Jew stands with Israel. It was the strangest thing. At first I tried to respond. "Don't you have Jews in Mississippi?" Not all Jews are knee jerk supporters of Israel. I'm certainly not. But somehow explaining J-Street ambivalence toward the direction Israel is going at the moment to faceless Aryan Nation bullies who just assume they're hitting me where I live, well, extra stupid.  In fact, we tend to look more askance at some of that country's glaring missteps than Christians do, who adore the nation because it fits into whatever insane End of Time philosophy they've got locked up in their secret hearts.
     It didn't waste the day. But it wasted an hour of the day. Maybe two. I'd focus on my work, manage 20 or 30 minutes, and then jump back on, read a few, wince, block five or 10 replies—I trained myself not to even read them—and then flee back to my job. 
     Still, it managed to cast the afternoon in a mournful, sour pall, to think that such creatures exist, they populate our country, the South especially, it seems, muscles twitching in their jaws, bereft that they can't openly loathe blacks anymore and still keep their jobs at the Piggly Wiggly, determined to keep the one group they can hate, gays (and, I guess, Jews) under their boot.  It must supply them with the self-esteem they lack.
     I don't have energy to pluck out any more specific examples of ugliness. A number seemed to think Israel is responsible for ISIS, or felt outraged that I had pointed out that, like ISIS, the people behind the Southland's pro-bigotry laws are using their faith as an excuse to hurt people. That made them victims, which is how all bullies view themselves, the better to justify their hostility for the world. You haven't lived until someone with "fuhrer" as part of their Twitter handle accuses you of insensitivity.
     I had to keep reminding myself that bigotry is, at its core, a form of ignorance: the uninformed ramping up their fright at something that a non-terrified person would instead learn something about and thus no longer fear. A failure of empathy. A crime against empathy, really. And that for all their attempts to hurt others — like Mississippi's new law — their true victims are themselves, crouched at the keyhole of their worldview, missing life's pageant. A number of my new Twitter pals referred to "white genocide"—their term for a world including minorities and people different from themselves. "White suicide" is more like it, as a culture is defined by its worst elements (another link with ISIS: they slur the thing they would promote by associating it with themselves).
     Enough. I'm not the Idiot Police. That's a mantra of mine. I can't fix them and shouldn't try—there are too many, for starters, and their logic twists in such a way that they always end up right, in their own minds if nowhere else. It's the rule of their existence. The world will step over them, like a pedestrian avoiding dog shit, and keep moving forward. Let time do its work. It seems like the hate is the only constant in some places, such as Mississippi, and various flesh vessels are born, live and spend their lives allowing the hate to inhabit them before they pass it onto their children like a hereditary disease, like syphilis. They not only lost the Civil War, but they're still losing it, still losing, every day, thrashing at the modern world with their limp little noodle of a creed as it rushes past them, cringing at their touch. 
      Not to indict them all. I've been South—the photo above is Durham, North Carolina. They don't all seem to be sputtering haters. Or maybe that's just the polite public face, until they can run to Twitter and reveal their true, hideous selves.

      Quite the sorry spectacle. And no harm in feeling pity for them, an echo of the empathy they obviously lack. I think it's important not to hate them back, because if you do, then they've won, a little. To be honest, I felt like Dante, pausing at some trench in the netherworld, holding a handkerchief to my nose, half-swooning as I gaze as long as possible upon the horrible sight, the upturned faces of the damned, before hurrying on with a shudder and a sigh. Some people are their own punishment. It's best to linger among them only long enough to remind yourself how good it is to not be one of them, to have the pleasure of getting away from them. It's a luxury they will never enjoy.

Give Wayne a raise already!

     Everyone should have a lousy job in the food industry. At least once: good for the soul. I had two. My very first job — well, not counting the seven years delivering newspapers, starting at age 9 — was the summer I turned 16. At Barnhill's, an 1890s-themed ice cream parlor in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Pay was $2.30 an hour and I was a soda jerk/janitor since I worked a split shift. I showed up at 5:30 p.m., scooped ice cream for a few hours, shut down the restaurant and returned at 5:30 a.m. to open it back up.
     Grueling. I still remember solitary frustration of mopping the floor, hearing a "pop" above me, being showered by broken glass, and realizing that I had jammed the mop handle into one of the large glass globes around a light fixture.
     That was one summer.
     A few bad jobs later — junior counselor at a summer camp, moving cardboard boxes in a warehouse for J.C. Penney — I became a baker at Bob Evans, a restaurant that prided itself in its biscuits. I would stand at a table in the middle of the kitchen and whip up biscuits. One busy Sunday I baked 250 pounds worth.
     The guy at the dish tank was named Wayne. I can still see him — the back of his head anyway. Crew cut, black plastic glasses held on by an elastic band. He'd stand at the long stainless steel sink, throw the dirty dishes into a big square rack, hose them down with a sprayer dangling on a metal hose. Pull up the metal door, steam billowing out, push the dirty rack in, the glistening clean rack sliding out the other side

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"What wounds are these?"

     It looks like my 20-year-old is going to spend the summer interning in Washington, D.C.. Concerned parent that I am, on Sunday night, learning the address of the apartment he'll likely share with a pal, I plugged it into Google map and ascertained that, yes, there is a Washington Metro station a convenient five minute walk away. 
     On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a front page story thoroughly describing what a godawful mess the Washington Metro has become, after years of managerial bungling and deferred maintenance. Original cars from when the system opened in 1976 are still in use. The only recourse might be to shut down stretches of the system for months at a time, paralyzing the city. 
    The article recounted fatal crashes and shirked safety standards. My first thought was, "We'll have to get him a car." Though cars have accidents too, far more than transit systems do, and, thinking of Washington traffic, decided it is probably better to take our chances with the Metro. 
     Toward the end, the story, written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, there is a description of a 2009 collision that woke up dozing legislators, noting that "eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were wounded." Later, of another collision: "No one was wounded, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier."
     Does anything pop out at you from those two sentences? For me, it was the word "wounded." I always thought of wounds as something that happen to soldiers in battle. Riders hurt by mishaps on crumbling transit system are "injured."
    I wanted to shake it off—everybody hates a fusspot—but being a writer is nothing if not about sweating the details. Though I realize that the Times can commit howling errors, like any other newspaper—I once saw a front page where they dropped the dateline--it still seemed something worth pointing out.
     Trudging upstairs, coffee in hand, I started to compose my polite note. Not to the public editor, that would seem like ratting out the reporters for a minor lapse. We're all cooking in the same pot. Write to the reporters themselves. First, praise for the interesting story. Then, a reluctant mention of the topic at hand...
    But first, I plugged "wound" into my online dictionary. I have a personal rule that most people who point out errors are themselves wrong, leaping to draw attention to the perceived flaw without ever checking to determine that they are correct. The nameless iMac dictionary defined the verb "wound" as: "inflict an injury on." Period. And while their examples are both military, "the sergeant was seriously wounded," for the verb, and the adjective, "a wounded soldier," there is nothing to exclude the word from being used to describe victims of a wheezing train system soon to be ferrying my beloved child.
    Language changes. Perhaps we're seeing a word in transition. Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary endorses my meaning, "To hurt by violence." 
    But the full 1933 Oxford English Dictionary definition begins, "A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury." and traces it back more than a thousand years, to Beowulf, "da sio wund ongon,"
    That could in theory mean flying glass in a train accident caused by bungling bureaucrats. Seeking something more current than the 1930s, I went on-line and found confirmation from an impressive grammar blog called Daily Writing Tips: 

     "In modern usage, the noun wound [WOOND] refers to any injury that tears the flesh.
     The verb to wound [WOOND], however, retains its earliest meaning: “to inflict a deliberate injury that tears the flesh.”

     Underline "deliberate." So the Times story is indeed on shaky ground, at least using this authority. People have a tendency to stop collecting evidence once they've validated what they already believe, and I'm no different, particularly since I have my own work to get to this morning. 
     I wasn't going to bother writing to the reporters—who'd welcome that email? I tried to proceed with my day, but felt like I was being timid. "The secret wound lives on within the breast," as Virgil writes. So I dashed off notes to the reporters and, to my surprise, heard back almost immediately from Stolberg, who said that the mistake wasn't theirs—they did use "injure"—but the harm to the article was inflicted by some spinning gear elsewhere in the vast New York Times mechanism. She had already made inquiries, and it was quickly fixed in the on-line version. So I'm not the only person sensitive to these nuances. Now if we could only get The New Yorker to stop saying "insure" when they should say "ensure."
     Enough. Having made my share of blunders in print, I hope I haven't belabored this small point too tediously. As Shakespeare writes: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

The Left can be as looney as the Right

Untitled, silkscreen by Barbara Kruger (1989, The Broad collection).

     I've seen some strange weather in Chicago — a day when it was 105 degrees, another, 26 below zero, green skies, monsoon rains and massive snows. But I've never seen a day like Saturday, beginning at dawn with flurries in April, then alternating from blue-skied sunshine to white-out blizzard, and back. Sun, then snowstorm. Clear skies. London fog. All. Day. Long.
     "BI-POLAR VORTEX" a Facebook friends labeled a video of the maelstrom, resurrecting a twitter tag from two years back.
     My poor saucer magnolia blossoms. Open for one day and then, boom, snow and freeze.
     "Where's your global warming now?!" I snarled at the sky.
     "That's not what it means," my wife informed me, perhaps forgetting whom she married.
     Yes dear, I know. A feeble attempt at humor, based on conservatives who, trumpeting their ignorance of all things scientific, declare that really cold days are a refutation of climate change: "How could the world be warmer if it's cold now?" That's like standing in a house engulfed in flame, pulling open the freezer and announcing, "Look! How can there be a fire? The popsicles are fine!"
     But I don't want to rag on the Right. It's too easy. I've started to notice that while the Right's irrationalities get frequent denunciation in the press, the Left has its own irrationalities that receive gentler handling....

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