The Titanic: stay at your station until relieved

     Friday was the 104th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic—it snuck up on me this year. I wrote something four years ago, for the centennial, that bears repeating.

"Oh, they built the ship Titanic,
to sail the ocean blue
And they thought they built a ship
that the water couldn't go through.
But the good Lord raised his hand,
said the ship would never land.
It was sad when the great ship went down."

     Or so the version went that we sang at Camp Wise, in Chardon, Ohio, in the 1970s, a song that had been sung at summer camps for the previous 50 years, is sung still, and might very well be sung forever.
     Exactly 100 years this Sunday, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of 1,500 passengers. With a weekend sure to be dedicated to its memory, the question is: why? Why this shipwreck? What about it so resonates in the public's mind? The Lusitania, torpedoed in 1915, took 1,198 lives and is a trivia question. Nobody sings about it.
     The obvious answer is that the Titanic story has something for everybody. There is luxury and poverty, heroism and cowardice, its midnight iceberg rendezvous a payback for the boast of being "unsinkable." Movies and books keep the memory alive, as does its presence in the language—almost everybody knows what rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic means.
     As the son of a radio operator, who grew up listening to the urgent chirpings of Morse code coming out of the Hammarlund Super Pro radio receiver displayed in his den, the part of the Titanic story that always gets to me is the heroic tale of the Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride.
     As the junior radioman—he was just 22—Bride had the night shift. It was just after midnight, April 15, 1912, and he was telling Phillips to go to bed, when the captain stuck his head into the wireless room.
     "We've struck an iceberg," Captain Edward Smith said. "You better get ready to send out a call for assistance."
     Ten minutes later Smith was back, telling them to start calling for help.
     Phillips began tapping out "CQD" ­- "CQ" meant "calling all stations" and "D" meant "distress"—as well as the ship's location and call letters, "MGY."
    "He flashed away at it and we joked while he did so," Bride recalled. "All of us made light of the disaster."  
     Bride told Phillips that here was his opportunity to send an "SOS."
     "It's the new call and it may be your last chance to send it," Bride said. "We picked up first the steamship Frankfurt. We gave her our position and said we had struck an iceberg and needed assistance."
     Phillips reached the Cunard liner Carpathia. "Come at once!" he signaled. The liner replied it was 58 miles away and "coming hard." Phillips told Bride to tell the captain. "I went through an awful mass of people to his cabin," he later said. "The decks were full of scrambling men and women."
     Over the next two hours, as the ship slowly sank, Phillips kept sending out distress signals, hoping to find a closer ship— there was one, but its radio operator had gone to sleep. Bride kept tabs on what was going on outside.
     "I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it, I don't know," Bride later recalled.
     Phillips suggested "with a sort of a laugh" that Bride look out and see if all the people were off in the boats, or if any boats were left. Bride found one collapsible boat left, only because the men were having an "awful time" trying to get it free. Captain Smith returned to the radio shack one last time.
     "Men," the captain said. "You have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it's every man for himself."
     "I looked out," Bride said. "The boat deck was awash. Phillips clung on sending and sending. He clung on for about 10 minutes, or maybe 15 minutes after the captain had released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about."
     Bride returned to the collapsible boat, and was holding onto it when a wave crested over the deck and washed it away. He turned for one last look at the ship, "smoke and sparks were rushing out of her funnel." Bride lost hold on that boat and had to swim through the icy water to the other boats, as the band played "Autumn" on deck. Hands pulled him into another lifeboat. Phillips perished.
     For me, the Titanic radio operator story is a metaphor for life. It signals to us something about duty and perseverance in the face of difficulty. You're not the captain. You didn't design the ship. You don't own it. But you stay at your station, no matter what, tapping out your messages with all the skill you have, as long as you can, until relieved.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 2012

"A rigged, disgusting, dirty system"

     After being hectored to ignore Donald Trump, the media did just that after he lost Wisconsin to Ted Cruz.
     Suddenly the air was out of the balloon, the billionaire's mojo gone, or severely bummed out.
     For a few precious days.  But he has a way of bobbing to the surface, like the piece of ... Trump that he is. 
     So now he's back, demanding his due.
     Let's give Trump his due.
     Yes, he's leading the polls, typically double-digits over Ted Cruz, depending on the poll, which is sorta like preferring acid to poison. He's expected to rock the New York primary on Tuesday. He'll be twirling in the limelight like a prima ballerina, no doubt.
      But Trump is all hat and no cattle, as Lyndon Johnson used to say. Without forming an organization or grasping the workings of Republican primaries, he is allowing Cruz to suck up the delegates, and the GOP is plotting to yank the nomination out from under Trump's nose if he doesn't reach the magic number of 1237, the number required to win on the first ballot. So the win in New York will be hollow.  
      Which sparked an aria of complaint from Trump early last week, aimed at the media of course.

"The media itself is so dishonest. Honestly, I do wonder. I’m millions of votes ahead, which they don’t even mention, they don’t even talk about. They talk about delegates. And I’m hundreds of delegates ahead but the system is rigged, folks. It’s a rigged, disgusting dirty system. It’s a dirty system and only a nonpolitician would say it."

    The cry continued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Friday:
    "The only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will," Trump wrote, sounding very much like Bernie Sanders.

     Pardon me, but boo-fuckin'-hoo.

     For a winner, Trump seems to be jumping straight from doing battle to bitching about the outcome without even going through the formality of defeat.    
     "A rigged, disgusting, dirty system"
     Well, yeah. So is international trade. So is war. So is our judicial system. So are most if not all of the problems that will land with a thump on his desk, should fate be so cruel to the United States as to allow him to be president. I don't hear Obama complaining, and he spent seven years pushing against the Confederacy of Obstructionist Idiocy who'd happily see the country fail if it means Obama fails too. Don't hear him moaning about it, though.
     What happened to win-win-win? What happened to winning so much that we'll get bored with winning? Why doesn't he just start winning right now, so we can see him winningly win his way toward the White House.
     Right. We know. Because it's all lies and bluster, lies and bluster that about 50 percent of the Republicans in this country nevertheless lap up. 
    I swear, it seems 50 percent of the country will believe anything.  Well, better be exposed as a fraud now than wait until he's elected. Which still might happen. 

Chicago police aren't plagued by racism: we are.

     Sigh.
     You know what’s happening. I know what’s happening. Do I have to say it? I guess so. It’s my job.
     OK. Here goes.
     Of course the very fact that there was a police task force is part of the well-oiled machinery of doing nothing with flair. Crisis 101 teaches you to appoint a task force, buy time, create the illusion that change is occurring, when what you are really doing is kicking the can down the road, again.
     The can tumbled to earth with a bang Wednesday in the scathing “Recommendations for Reforms” report, documenting what everybody knows, including the kind of succinct assessment that makes good headlines. “Chicago police ‘have no regard’ for lives of black people, report says” is how the Washington Post put it. And Napoleon escaped from Elba. Sorry if I’m the one to tell you.
     The Sun-Times online headline was “Racism, lack of accountability plague Chicago Police Department"...

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"When you've see one stripper, you've seen them all"

Little Egypt

     A reader, reacting to yesterday's column about the City Council considering changing the strip club law regarding booze accused me of "dowdy puritanical moralizing." Ouch. I hope that's not the case. Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly. This column, from four years ago, might provide some background, and help explain where I'm coming from regarding this subject.

     Chicago was once home to a now vanished class of entertainer: the famous American stripper. It is where Little Egypt danced the Hoochee-Coochie, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and where Sally Rand — who took her name from another local institution, Rand McNally — flashed her feather fans, at the 1933 Century of Progress.
     They were of course only the most notorious of an army of bump-and-grinders who once entertained at venues around the city, in the days before they were swept away leaving Chicago — singularly among major American cities — a virtual desert when it comes to strip clubs.
     Chicago's lone outpost that serves up both liquor and female flesh, VIP's on Kingsbury, last week seemed to finally survive a nearly two-decade legal effort to close it, with the city deciding it would rather get the millions of dollars in tax revenue than eliminate what had been an occasional irritation.
     When VIP's was "Thee Doll House" it had its moment of front-page infamy, when an accountant embezzled $250,000 from his firm and spent it there, somehow, a reminder that such clubs are often seen — not without reason — as fronts for prostitution, as well as invitations to organized crime. Known as "clip joints," unwary conventioneers might find themselves presented with enormous bills which, if they declined to pay, would lead to a sidewalk beating while complicit police whistled and looked the other way.
     Avoiding fleeced patrons — and to protect dancers from drunken groping — was the rational for separating liquor and striptease, and explains boozeless strip emporiums such as the Admiral Theatre on Lawrence Avenue.
     Once, though, Chicago had countless strip clubs. New Yorker critic A.J. Liebling devoted a surprising amount to this topic in his 1952 "Second City" report on Chicago.
     "There are scores of strip-tease joints," he wrote. "The performances ... are always the same, but they are invariably unpleasant. ... One of the girls, introduced as 'Mlle. Yvonne Le Vonne, straight from Paris — and I mean Paris, Illinois, ha ha,' then goes through the familiar business of removing most of her specially constructed clothes, which have none of the sexual quality of other clothes. She does this with an idiot gravity, and as a climax puts one foot on each side of the microphone shaft and does several kneebends. She then shakes herself as if she had just sat down on a spilled beer, and ends up posing on one foot, with the other leg bent behind her. After that, she comes down into the crowd to cadge a drink, but she will settle for a cigarette if only the regular customers are present. Why they are present, night after night, is their own pathologically mysterious business."
     Chicago's strip club strip — along West Madison and North Clark Street — was swept away after Richard J. Daley was elected mayor in 1955. A man so devoted to order that he once had his limo stop to clean up after a man who dropped a newspaper on Michigan Avenue, Daley plastered the city with "Keep Chicago Clean" signs and purged it of what he considered moral sinkholes.
     The suburbs stepped in to fill the void — of course Cicero, and places like Heavenly Bodies in Elk Grove Village.
     My job has brought me to many strip clubs at one point or another, and I can't say I was terribly impressed. The Admiral was just strange — pneumatic-breasted porn stars standing on their heads. Heavenly Bodies led me to the theory — formed while chatting with a quite beautiful gal while she performed a lap dance — that men visit these places not so much to look at the women as to have the women look at them, to gain the attention of someone who normally wouldn't give them the time of day, even if it costs $10 to do so.
     Thee Doll House was simply excruciating; I was assigned to extract information from the dancers about the guy who dropped the $250,000. This proved impossible, and by the end of the second day trying, I was on the phone with my editor, begging him to pull me out of there before the boredom killed me.
     "Burlesque strippers are a great deal like elephants," Joseph Mitchell once wrote, "when you've seen one, you've seen them all."
     Speaking of "burlesque:" under that moniker an under-the-radar, steampunk-meets-stripping renaissance, of sorts, has taken place in Chicago over the past decade. Rather than relying on specific established clubs, which can attract unwanted city attention, as V.I.P.'s has learned, dancers, as they view themselves, pop up at bars, usually later at night, perform a show and then vanish.
     I met one such stripper through Facebook a year ago. We had lunch— a perfectly nice young lady, bright-eyed, ambitious, filled with lofty aspirations to art that strippers invariably embrace to masquerade the essential tawdriness of what they do. Afterward, I witnessed a late night show performed by her and a few of her friends— joined by my wife, I should probably add — thinking it might be fodder for a column. It was an energetic review, well intentioned, with a certain costumed solemnity, like the R-rated grown-up version of preschoolers putting on a pageant with bumblebees and smiling suns. I thought of the Mitchell quote, as well as the dictum, "don't take a bazooka to a flea," and never wrote anything about it. 
                       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 18, 2012

Block the booze and bosoms bill

Charles Ray, "Fall '91, 1992," The Broad, Los Angeles.

     A confession: I never quite got strip clubs. They seem so dreary and beside-the-point. (“You just haven’t gone to the right strip clubs,” growled a colleague, when I aired this theory in the newsroom, praising Indiana strip clubs with a gleam in his eye that made me want to rush out and investigate the situation. …)
     Sorry, where were we? Yes, strip clubs. Kinda like paying to go to a restaurant where they wheel the meal out, let you look at it a bit, and then return the food to the kitchen untouched. What’s the purpose of that?
     The Chicago City Council is threatening to change the city’s long-standing separation of booze and bosoms. Right now, if one of Chicago’s four strip clubs wants to have topless dancers, it can’t sell beer. Except for one club, VIP’s A Gentleman’s Club on Kingsbury, which has somehow skirted the law by paying millions of dollars in back tax in 2012. (Well, four clubs and numerous steampunk “neo-burlesque” special events that pop up at midnight shows all over town, but they dwell in the shadows, in ephemeral, quasi-legality and aldermen seem not to know about them).
     Ald. Emma Mitts (37th), chairman of the licensing committee, was sponsoring an ordinance that would allow alcohol in strip clubs. Underline “was.” In the kind of Keystone Kops confusion typical of the council, she said Tuesday she was shocked, shocked to find that her law allows full nudity. The law appears to have been written by VIP’s owner, Mitts suggested, and the alderman only glancingly acquainted herself with it before adding her support. So rather than the law being voted on Wednesday, she has clawed it back for airbrushing....

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Museum to the result ignores the cause

     John Kerry is in Hiroshima for Group of Seven talks, and on Monday toured the city's Peace Memorial Museum, becoming the first sitting secretary of state to visit the museum and take its grim journey through the dropping of the atomic bomb.
     Kerry said "everybody" should tour the museum, including President Obama, who visits Japan next month, and having toured it myself this past March, I agree with him.
     It's a somber place, by necessity, but as stark as the story it tells, of the atomic bomb exploding above Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, and the toll on the humans living below, it is also an incomplete story as well.
      You can't be a human being and not be saddened by the experience—Kerry called it "gut-wrenching." But I was also struck by the subtle dishonesty of the exhibits, which emphasize the deaths of school children over just about anything else. Again and again. Mannequins holding their tattered uniforms, photos of their injuries. It would be possible to visit the museum and miss the fact that there had been a war at all, one started by the Japanese invading Manchuria, a brutal global struggle for survival which the Americans, who were fiercely isolationist, unfortunately, were drawn into only when the Japanese attacked our base at Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning in December, 1941, killing 2,000 American servicemen.
    This is not a minor point. Though I suppose the Japanese can be forgiven for not emphasizing it, since we do such a poor job of teaching the story ourselves. Many Americans don't know we fought the Japanese in World War II, never worry about fine points like the atomic bomb. That was illustrated this week on my Facebook page, in a discussion of Germany, someone mentioned Japan's failure to come to terms with the horrors it inflicted on its neighbors in World War II. 
    "Japan is a pretty peaceful place," a woman replied, "what we did to them was horrible."
     In the discussion afterward, it turned out, she didn't know that Japan was responsible for some 10 million deaths prior to the dropping of the atomic bomb, most in China, which it invaded in 1937 and brutalized. Americans alive at the time were profoundly grateful for the bomb—85 percent approved its use, according to a Gallup Poll in September, 1945—which saved uncounted American lives — and Japanese — lives that would have been lost had we been forced to invade the island. Guilt over its use is based on anachronism: applying the values of today to the past, conveniently forgetting large swatches of history including the fact that, awful as the bombing of Hiroshima was, it did not prompt the Japanese to surrender. A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was required to do that.

   

There's a lot of that cult of personality thing going around

     Xi Jinping.
     Any idea what that means?
     Here, I’ll make it easier: A) Street slang for “Extreme Jumping,” the practice of leaping off tall buildings, cliffs, etc., in one of those flying squirrel suits while taking a video for YouTube
     B) Korean for “Sin Juniper,” a kind of gin made with radioactive juniper berries
     C) the president of the People’s Republic of China for the past three years
     Too easy, right? It’s “C,” though don’t feel bad if you guessed differently. We’re Americans, we can’t keep track with every detail in this big old globe of ours. I imagine a third of the country, if you asked them to name the leader of China, would say “Mao Zedong,” and he died in 1976.
     You’re certainly not alone.
     “I never heard of him,” Bill O’Reilly said on Fox News last September, after laboriously reading Xi’s name off a piece of paper. “I don’t know who he is.”

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