Is your dog ready for Passover?

    The woman who owns Evanger's Dog and Cat Food Company phoned a few weeks back. Was I, she asked, interested in writing about their Kosher dog food. "Sure!" I said, then paused. Wait a sec...Didn't I write about you guys? No, no she assured me. 

     I did, and only a few years back. Which means it is too soon for me to take up the subject again; a topic like Kosher dog food needs about 20 years between columns. But in checking, I re-read this Passover piece, and decided it merits sharing, for those who missed it, or just might enjoy reading it again (heck, I enjoyed reading it again, and I wrote the damn thing).  I particularly appreciated the part where I scour the Talmud for dog references. I always feed our dog Kitty before feeding myself: it seems cruel to eat in front of her. Now I see that doing so is also ordained by God. I imagine that dynamic is found in a lot of supposedly-religious practices: impulse first, then divine sanction, if available, second. Then pretend it's the other way around. 
    Happy Passover.

     "So is Kitty keeping Passover?"
     Spoken by my 15-year-old, one of those wise-ass teen questions that pour out of kids' mouths at that age. He had been asking about our family Passover plans, cringing at the thought of matzo sandwiches.
     Yes, I said, at Passover—which begins Monday night—the bread gets tucked away, a minor deprivation to help remind him of the carnival of plenty that is his life. Just at that moment Kitty, our little bichon frise/shih tzu mix, squirmed. 
     What about the dog?
     Pets are of course freed from observing the strictures of faith. But I'm a big believer in checking stuff, as opposed to just guessing.
     So off to the Talmud—the rabbinic commentary over Jewish law and teachings, compiled over centuries. It runs more than 6,000 pages and contains a surprising amount about dogs. Though of course, given the nature of rabbinic debate, what it contains is often disputatious and contradictory.
     Rabbi Natan, for instance, insists raising an "evil dog" violates the principles of Torah. Rabbi Yaakov Emden interprets this to mean that all dogs are forbidden, being not only evil but the sort of thing that gentiles waste their time on. Other rabbis argue there is no prohibition against all dogs, but only against those dogs that are evil. The rabbis then fall to arguing over what an evil dog might be—barking and/or biting seem to be factors.
     Nor is the Talmud silent on feeding pets, using a verse in Deuteronomy to insist that— Rabbi Emden notwithstanding—you must feed your dogs before you feed yourself.
     But what the Talmud says and what Jews actually do can be entirely different matters, so I consulted an oracle far outstripping the Talmud in both size and scope—Google. Plug in "Kosher dog food" and the first site that pops up is for Evanger's Dog and Cat Food Company of Wheeling, Ill.
     "It's a family business," said Brett Sher, whose parents bought it in 2002. The company was started in 1935 by Dr. Fred Evanger, who raised Great Danes.
     "He wanted high-quality pet food for his dogs," said Sher. "That's where it all started."
     The factory is still in the barn that Evanger converted in 1935—though it is moving to Markham within three months.
     "We are the only family-owned cannery making pet food in the United States," he said, emphasizing how they like to buy produce and meat from the Chicago area.
     "Most of our raw materials are from Chicago," Sher said. "Ninety percent are from within 50 miles of the plant." They have 80 employees, and sell pet food in 5,000 stores nationwide and around the world.
     Evanger's offers exotic fare like "Duck & Sweet Potato Dinner" and "Grain Free Pheasant." They sell pet food made of buffalo, of rabbit, of wild salmon—and of pork, a big seller in Israel, ironically. A reminder that the products are not "Kosher"—not made from approved animals slaughtered in a supervised, ritual way—but rather "Kosher for Passover," meaning they don't contain certain grains or milk products.
    "We do have a rabbi who comes in, unannounced, and does an inspection to make sure we're not using chametz," said Sher.  
     "Chametz" means grains prohibited during Passover. The issue is not what the dog can eat, but what can be kept in the owner's house. During Passover, observant Jews rid their homes of all chametz, and most dog food contains grain. (Ironically, non-grain pork dog food can be kept in an observant Jew's home at Passover while bread cannot).
     Families sometimes resort to symbolically selling their pets and pet food to the neighbors, a traditional dodge, or even boarding pets during the holiday. Or there's Evanger's.
     "This way the dog can eat with the family rather than eating outside," Sher said. "It takes the hassle out of all that."
     It wouldn't make much business sense to sell products only useful for a week in the spring, and then only to Jews. But many pets have gluten issues, plus there's a cachet to the word "Kosher," even in places like Japan.
     "They think it's healthier so they love it," said Holly Sher, Brett's mother. "Overseas, they like it." Chicago customers like it too.
     "The Kosher for Passover is a large selling point for some people," said Travis Thomas, owner of Wigglyville pet boutique — Evanger's isn't sold by chains, just independents.
     It is God, in the book of Exodus, who orders Jews not to have bread in their homes during Passover: "Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses."
     There is another passage in Exodus that I was surprised the Talmudic rabbis didn't pick up on: "But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue," God says in 11:7. Now maybe the Lord was referring exclusively to Egyptian dogs. But I think the argument could be made that God was recognizing and accepting the presence of all dogs. Which, thanks to Evanger's, can be fed right next to the pious Seder table.
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 24, 2013

When it comes to Rauner, the plain truth is bad enough

     Karen Lewis used to do standup at the Woodlawn Tap.

     Before she was a teacher, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union briefly wanted to be a comedian.

     She still has a tendency to let loose with both barrels, like Wednesday, when she called Gov. Bruce Rauner "a new ISIS recruit" in front of the City Club.

     I winced, because the truth about Rauner is bad enough: our most rigid and immoral governor in living memory, who not only did not accomplish anything he said he would, but, indulging in the extremism that has brought the Republican Party to the edge of ruin, turned his standoff with House Speaker Mike Madigan into statewide paralysis, hurting thousands of the most vulnerable Illinoisans and truly damaging the state's vital institutions.

     Just say that. No need to drag in terrorism. Wild exaggeration is a tactic of the weak, the Occupy movement vilifying a system they haven't the foggiest notion of how to actually change. Comparing Rauner to ISIS doesn't hurt him — he's the most don't-give-a-damn politician I've ever encountered, well, except for Madigan, which is what makes their faceoff so maddening. If they were a pair of dogs with their jaws locked on each other, we could turn a hose on them.
    As it is, all we can do is wait. So I understand Lewis' frustration...

To continue reading, click here.

Our mediocrity is reflected on our money

August Saint-Gaudens $20 gold piece

     It was Napoleon who said, "If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna."
     Meaning, don't be half-assed. Don't do things part way. Finish the job.
     Like the U.S. Treasury Department taking Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 bill and, in the same smooth motion, putting him on the back.
     Weenies. Really. If we wake up one day and we're a province of China, it'll be because we're not bold enough to change the person on our currency every century.
     Jackson has been on the twenty since 1928.
     I should show my hand here.
     I was a coin collector, which means also a currency collector, a little.
     That might sound timid, but you need guts to collect coins.
     To be a coin collector is to despair for America, a little.
     Because we not only know how far we lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to putting something of beauty in our pockets.
    We also know how we fail to match our own legacy from eras gone by.
     We weren't always like this.
     Changing the twenty now made me think of another time when we changed the twenty—the $20 gold piece, that is. Teddy Roosevelt was president.
     "I think our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness," he wrote to the treasury

$10 gold piece

secretary in 1904. Roosevelt sought out August Saint-Gaudens to re-design the $10 and $20 gold pieces, leading perhaps the most beautiful coins ever produced by this or any country.
     I'm not one of those complaining that Tubman somehow isn't worthy—she does seem a bit of a flat historical figure at this point, veiled in semi-myth, like Johnny Appleseed. But that could be my own ignorance of her history. She was a real person, who did real acts of heroism to free slaves, and I get the need to nod in the direction of women and African-Americans, though were I them, I might be miffed at the tininess of the gesture. 
     Other women will crowd the backs of smaller denominations: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul. peaking out from the back of the $10, Marian Anderson singing on the back of the $5.
     What they should have done is exiled the lot—Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, et al—for a decade, ushered the women onto the front of all the bills. Then we could bring the presidents back, or not , in 2027. 
    But that would be bold. And people might complain. Hence these half-measures, these mincing semi-honors.  Stealthily stealing into one suburb of Vienna.
     What kills me most is they're keeping Jackson, on the back, in some capacity, a craven surrender to the idea that we can't change anything decisively. The heart breaks.
     Yes, there are more important things, as day by day, year by year, the United States sinks into frozen decrepitude. But the money is a symbol of our paralysis. In a functioning country, it wouldn't be such a big honking deal to change the face on currency, because we'd have new money every decade or two.
     Not this country. Tiny interests are the tail that wags the dog. So rather than irk the change-counting machine industry—yes, such a thing exists—we keep the penny, while aversion to change of any sort inspires us to keep its Lincoln design which, by the way, first appeared in 1909. We've seen it plenty.

     I won't rave on about the ugliness of our coinage. I'd rather see a sharp bas relief of Donald Trump on the quarter than the bland profile of Washington we've been looking at since 1932. Although maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. I'm thinking what kind of currency, what kind of coinage, a dynamic nation striding into the future would have. Maybe these ugly coins and outdated bills, and incremental half changes are exactly what we deserve. 

Sam Adams brewer crafts full-bodied prose

     In a man's life, there are many beers. Sloshed into red plastic cups or sipped out of icy cans, they blur into one frothy river of suds.
     But I clearly remember my first bottle of Sam Adams, though I drank it 31 years ago this month.
     I was visiting a former college roommate, Didier, in Boston. Di is Belgian, and Belgians know beer. He had already introduced me to Chimey, the Trappist ale.
     We found ourselves at a campus hangout, Grendel's Den.
     "You have to try this new beer," he said.
     We ordered Samuel Adams Boston Lager, which had gone on sale the month before, the pipe dream of a sixth generation brewer.
     Not too dark, like Guinness, a bite, but not too much. It tasted like ...

     To continue reading, click here.

Hatred is stupid

     We're getting into the hateful part of April.
     We just passed the anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing.
      Today is the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 
     And tomorrow is the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School and, perhaps not coincidentally, Hitler's birthday. 
     Which brings to mind an old saying...
     I actually try not to use old sayings.
     As a writer, I try to conjure up fresh stuff.
     But there's one that's so true, and, unfortunately, so handy, it deserves mention:
     "Hate is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die."
     That's it, in a nutshell (one reason to avoid old sayings: one leads to another). I thought of it, again last week, when I was hearing on Twitter from Mississippi's Neo-Nazi community, who were upset when I compared their hate-based philosophy to ISIS's. 
      Instead of responding—what would be the point?—I would look at their Twitter pages. Considering the source (a cliche more than a saying) with graphics straight out of Julius Streicher's Der Stermer. I reported a few that were over-the-top to the authorities at Twitter and, to my surprise and satisfaction, Twitter took a few of the most hateful pages down.
     I didn't chat too much with the White Supremacists because "you can't fix stupid," another useful saying—but if I did, I would tell them, "This Hitler you so love. This Nazi stuff.... You do know, it didn't work out well for the Germans."
     Five million German soldiers died in World War II, a fact that doesn't get aired much because the world withheld its sympathy from the monsters who started the war. Another half million German civilians died, unmourned, even, in a way, by the Germans themselves, who had the good sense, post-war, to be revolted by what they had done (generally; the East Germans, denied freedom of thought, never quite got it). 
     Bigotry is a form of ignorance—that isn't an aphorism, I made that up myself. And so if you don't know that people are pretty much the same, you don't know that your self-adoring worldview inspires you to do self-destructive things, and to throw away your one precious life, either focusing on the thing you hate, or in some spasm of violence. 
    Underline "self-adoring." These hateful world views are a blend of ignorance and unrestrained ego. Hegel told the Germans that Providence intended them "to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe," and, stupid and pompous, they believed him.
     The stupidity of hatred is not remarked upon enough; it should be. Otherwise, the haters have an easier time fooling   themselves that they are somewhere in the realm of the acceptable. They're not. They feel emboldened now, with Donald Trump giving the a double thumbs up, to wander into the public sphere and air their idiocy. When I would hear vicious things from White Nationalists, I'd sometimes reply, "Given the bullshit you seem to believe, who could possibly care what your opinion is?" They never reply, and I'd be tempted to think it might sink in, a little. But then, the truth has to be, if they were capable of self-assessment, they wouldn't be the way they are.

Milt Trenier is still here

Milt and Bea Trenier

    The Chez Paree is gone. The Blue Note is gone. Mister Kelly’s, Le Bistro, Birdhouse: gone, gone, gone, and forgotten, mostly.
     The performers who played there? Mickey Brant and Peggy King and Enzo Stuarti? Also gone.
     But Milt Trenier is not gone. Having played everywhere and known everybody — Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett — he’s right here, where he’s been for the past 40 years, living happily with his wife, Bea, in Skokie.
     “It’s been a very good life, a wonderful life,” said Tenier, 86, unleashing a rich, baritone “ha-ha-ha” laugh that comes to him as easily as breathing and almost as frequently. “I’m feeling good.”
     You may not remember his group, The Treniers. Their lone Top 10 hit, “Go, Go, Go” was in 1951. They were certainly famous: cameos in classic rock movies — “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Don’t Knock the Rock” — and guest spots on the top TV shows: Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson.
     Still, time passes. It’s more likely you remember his club, Milt Trenier’s Lounge, a cabaret he opened in 1977. Sammy Davis Jr. would stop by. Muhammad Ali once played the piano there. Dennis Farina was the bouncer. But Trenier closed the place in 1997...

To continue reading, click here.

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