"Bags?! We don't have BAGS!"

     Authors are often portrayed as being intensely jealous of each other's success, and maybe some are. But I take genuine pleasure in the accomplishments of my writer friends. My former landlady is Carol Weston, the author of the "Ava and Pip" trio of young adult novels, delightfully blending together wordplay and the challenges of growing up. I was thrilled to hear that the three books will be sold bound into one volume at Costco as "The Diaries of Ava Wren."
    Not only is it good for Carol, but good for Costco, which has grown in stature in my eyes. The days when I go there grudgingly, cringing, and think of those space fatties on their scooters in "Wall-E" are long gone.  Now I know they've got great salmon, and usually the best prices. 
     Still, Henri Bendel it is not. And when I heard the good news, I couldn't help think of this column from seven years ago, when I juxtaposed the two shopping experiences. 

     Once upon a time, there was a store on North Michigan Avenue called Henri Bendel. It was a fancy New York clothing shop exclusively for ladies, but occasionally I would venture inside to buy a present for my wife.

    A clerk — think Audrey Hepburn — would glide over and ask if I needed help. I certainly did need help, and enjoyed slipping into the role of the Befuddled Male in a Woman's World — think Cary Grant, except without the looks.
     Together we would peer into various display cases, and she would hold up various garments, and I would settle on a purchase. Sure it was expensive, but as I always said, "At Henri Bendel, you pay for the service — the fact they also give you something is just an added bonus."
     All too soon I would be walking out of the store with an elaborately tissue-papered and boxed and gift-wrapped silk scarf or smart little hat, in a little chocolate and white striped bag, delicate as a debutante's purse, which I would proudly parade through the springtime warmth of Michigan Avenue (her birthday is in May, so it was always spring).
     Oh sure, inevitably I had to take the present back — the hat was wrong, or the scarf was wrong, and the whole thing cost far, far too much anyway, in her eyes. But that was OK because I got to return the item, with apologies and smiles and mutual understanding, another little Noel Coward play in the returns department.
     All this remembrance drifted back last week under the high white lights of Costco in Glenview. My wife, also a generous soul, in her fashion, had purchased for me a stylish black Calvin Klein jacket, all wool, a steal at $55.95 But it was too large, and I volunteered to return it and get the size smaller.
     The transaction was handled by a slack-faced clerk who met my attempt at conversation with blank silence. I entered the vast warehouse to try on the jacket in a smaller size. Gazing around — there are no mirrors in a Costco — I waited until a fellow customer came by, a woman pushing one of those immense carts. Again playing the Befuddled Male, I asked her whether this jacket fit. She said yes, but in the mechanical way that hypnotized people speak in movies — "Yehhhhhhhs" -- and without actually looking at me or breaking stride.
     I figured I'll look in a mirror at home.          
     While I was there, I wandered the aisles. Costco might be as familiar to you as your living room, but it's still new to me — someplace I first went to, under protest, five years ago and have been back to maybe once a year since.           

     The land of Brobdingnag, no question -- giant jars of mayonnaise, triple boxes of breakfast cereal, tubfuls of apple juice you could bathe in. The deal seems to be: You buy a month's worth of product, we shave 20 percent off the price.
     Fair enough, if you abandon the idea of shopping as a social act. I picked up four cans of shaving cream, shrink-wrapped into a slab, and a few other toiletries, plus a package of socks and the smaller jacket.
     I paid the clerk, who deposited the toiletries and the socks and the jacket into the cart, nudging it past the register. I looked at the items, jumbled in the cart.
     "Could I have a bag please?" I asked.
     "Bags?" the clerk exclaimed, in a tone of surprise and contempt. "Bags! We don't have bags." He looked at me for the first time, as if to see what manner of person was in front of him, this bag-asking man. "We have boxes. Over there."
     It was here that I remembered Henri Bendel — well, right after thinking of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." ("Badges! We don't need no stinkin' badges!")
     I selected a box, emblazoned with "THE FAT BURNING POWER OF CONCENTRATED GREEN TEA EXTRACT," put the stuff into it and, holding the box awkwardly in my arms, headed in shame to the car.
     The jacket fit, but the sleeves were too long, and the seamstress couldn't shorten them. Two days later, I returned to Costco.
     "I remember you from Monday!" I said brightly, to the slack-faced returns lady. She didn't react at all. I proceeded into the store. My wife wanted canola oil.
     I picked up a gallon, and noticed the brand name, "Kirkland Signature." That sounded familiar. Oh yes. But could it be? I hurried to the clothing area. "Kirkland signature" shirts. I looked up. Huge signs at the back: "Kirkland MEATS." "Kirkland BAKERY."
     This seemed so wrong. A feeling akin to horror — like the discovery that Soylent Green is people — crawled over my skin. Shirts produced by an oil company. Hot dogs turned out by a bakery.
     I tried to comfort myself — Trader Joe's brands everything with its name. But "Trader Joe's" is the name of the store. Who or what is "Kirkland"? (The town in Washington, it turns out, where Costco used to be headquartered). Is that supposed to be elegant?
     I bought the Kirkland oil. The snow was blowing horizontally outside, and I got a frozen handful of it slapped into my ear as I quickstepped to the car, wondering: How did that jaunty man in his mid-30s, happily squiring his brown and white striped bag down the Boul Mich in springtime, end up in this wintery parking lot?
     Henri Bendel closed its Michigan Avenue store in 1998.

Justice Ginsburg snaps at the bait

    

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

     I once had an editor who I once described this way: "He's not only timid, but inspires timidity in others."
     That's how leadership works. You act a certain way, and people see it, and follow your example, either because they like your style, or to curry favor, or because your actions, performed by a person in a position of authority, lend them a certain unspoken permission.
     That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump, who has made bullying and personal attack an even more common part of American politics than they already were, which is saying a lot. 

      Not only does every knuckle-dragging hater now feel free to stand up and walk the streets of our social discourse, but you get respected people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, denouncing Trump as a "faker" and worse, an action legal experts consider at best unwise, since it calls her impartiality into question should, say, the 2016 election end up before the high court the way the 2000 election did.
     You can see why it happened. Trump candidacy poses an existential crisis to any patriotic American, and credit must be given to the Bushes, Mitt Romney, Dan Webb, and other rock-ribbed Republicans who also denounced him, and went on record that they just could not support Trump, no matter what the GOP did. Ginsburg also felt she had to denounce Trump as the looming disaster he without question is.
     Of course, once you do that, you're playing Trump's game. He immediately attacked Ginsburg as a "a disgrace to the Court" and demanded that she resign.
     "It's so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that," Trump continued, and we know we have strayed into a particularly surreal realm when Trump is delivering lectures on dignity. Does anyone doubt how he'd react had Ginsburg instead praised him? Support for Trump is the measure of all things: those in his corner are winners, those opposed, losers. That is his value system. Whether it becomes our nation's too, well, that is what this struggle is all about. 

It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup

Barbara Kruger installation, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

     Being mathematically inclined is considered a good thing. But I'm not so sure. Spend time on Facebook and a ready grasp of numbers can be the bell clanging dully at train crossings. An annoying warning of limited practical use.
     I was scanning the posts of my Facebook friends, just seeing what is on people's minds for want of a better word. There was a photo of that $100 million Noah's Ark Ken Ham has built near his Creation Museum in Kentucky, along with the observation that the money could have been used to "buy a house and a car for every homeless person in Kentucky."
     The dull clang started up. I sighed and slid over to Google. There are an estimated 30,000 homeless people in Kentucky, a state of 4.4 million. About one in 150 persons. Sounds right.
Divide $100 million by 30,000 and you get $3,333. Not bad, but not enough to buy a house and a car — even in Kentucky.
     I shared that thought on Facebook and turned off the post's notifications, not wanting to be drawn into conversation about how many cars/houses one Ark replica could buy. Even to make the suggestion shows, not only innumeracy but a category error, a fundamental misunderstanding about why the Ark was built. It isn't as if Ham was rooting around for some way to help the people of Kentucky and thought, "Not low-income housing . . . an Ark! That's it! For when the Flood comes!" It's a profit-making tourist attraction — $40 a pop for adults, $28 for the kiddies. To suggest Ham should have done otherwise is like saying Walt Disney could have used the cash spent on "Dumbo" to support actual elephants instead. Yeah, sure, had his goal been helping elephants. But it wasn't. He was making a cartoon.

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Is this too strong for you?

"Venus of the Rags," by Michelangelo Pistoletto

     My mother reads this blog, faithfully. Which has never caused me a moment's embarrassment. Until, well, maybe today. Let's just say, Mom, you might want to skip this one. Agreed? Can we both agree on that? Good. Thanks. It'll make our conversation this afternoon just that much easier.  Besides, it's all about Samuel Johnson. Dull, Georgian stuff. Nothing of interest for mothers here.
     Right ... so, waiting for Mom to push away from the computer ... there ... done. Excellent. Bye Mom. Love you.

     As a fan of Samuel Johnson, I was of course delighted that my favorite magazine, The Economist, named its newest column after the Great Cham of Literature. (The Economist, while sharp and of-the-moment in every other regard, embraces the quaint old- school notion of not using reporters' bylines. The idea being, I suppose, that the newspaper—they call themselves a "newspaper" because magazines are so, I don't know, tawdry—speaks with a unified voice. So its columnists have noms de guerre like "Lexington" and "Bagehot" and "Buttonwood.")
     This Johnson entry on cuss words (I thought it was recent when I read it, but it's from 2015, a hazard of encountering material online) touched upon a subject near to the hearts of all of us working here at everygoddamnday.com. Almost immediately, Johnson deems "God damn" as "too strong for American ears." That might explain the mass of readers who haven't been showing up here.
    Not really. To be honest, it probably isn't the blog name.  Very few readers have complained over the past three years—a handful, hard though that may be to believe.  Credit the portmanteau with a lower-case "g" — "goddamn" — as opposed to "God damn." Makes all the difference in the world. Plus the blog is protected by an iron-ribbed pre-emptive putdown of those who might dare to blush at its name.
    While excellently written, The Economist, like all journalism, is not infallible, nor do its columnists have space to explore every tangent. What the Johnson column left out was the idea of context. "Fuck" still shocks on network television, or what's left of it, but is a staple of cable and of course online. I ran into ... (umm Mom, I thought we agreed this isn't interesting for you. Besides, isn't that the doorbell? I believe it is. The neighbor ... with muffins. Hot blueberry muffins. Or maybe that's Dad calling you. Either way, perhaps you should leave off reading at this point, and go have some tea, and we'll both be more comfortable ... truly) ... Hera Lindsay Bird's delightfully dirty new poem, "Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind," in two very different places on Twitter within the span of an hour Monday: one, the feed of Gili Bar-Hillel, a translator of Hebrew children's books, who accused me of being sarcastic about a bookstore (I like to see who I'm sparing with) and the second on the feed of Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine (I'd say we're due for the issue on "Fresh Voices from New Zealand," where Bird is safely tucked, for the moment). The wheels come off the poem a bit toward the end, but credit her with the best use of "fuck" in the opening line of a poem since Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse," 
     Where was I? Bad words. "Nigger" is unacceptable in most polite society, but tossed about freely by African-Americans when among themselves, and by the occasional blogger, holding his breath and wondering how it'll fly. And "God damn," while perhaps not showing up in the State of the Union anytime soon, skates by in the general filth and irrelevance of the online world. 
    Or so it seems to me.
    And Mom, really. I'm surprised at you. We'll discuss it later.

How the story ends depends on how it begins

     A neighbor—older, meticulous, German—was explaining to me how he takes plastic bags of dog excrement and flings them over his well-tended hedge into the street.
     The street we both share. Our street.
     He was indignant, almost proud.
     Of course there was more to it. The conversation had been about dogs—mine was in tow—and he told me that some people hurl their poop bags into his yard. So he hurls it right back.
     I walked away thinking, "Framing." How you begin the story determines how it ends. You include the provocation, and the reaction seems justified. Leave it out, and he becomes the jerk, throwing dog shit into the street. Which is true? Maybe both.
     We see this constantly. In his mind, Micah Johnson wasn't firing blindly at innocent police officers, Instead—again in his own mind—he was reacting to the Black Lives Matter movement, which keeps its view tight on those jumpy videos of cops shooting innocent folks. The cops meanwhile widen the frame, to include the violent neighborhoods they patrol, and wonder why everyone else doesn't.
     "Why are we just focusing on the very very small percentage of all interactions with police officers that go bad?" a reader wrote Saturday. "Why don't we start a movement that focuses on all black lives that tragically end? Lets go to the Southside and Westside and protest the shooting of all those young blacks by mostly other blacks....Can a liberal Democrat answer this question please?"

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Create your own reality

     The headlines Sunday morning were filled with tales of anxiety. "AMERICA GRIEVES, TENSE AND WARY," the New York Times announced across its front page. 
     Maybe so. It seemed a good time to escape to the Chicago Botanic Garden where nature is, as always, just nature. We must not have been alone in this impulse, because it was about as crowded as we've ever seen it: part the perfect summer day, part the dire news, perhaps, part both a lily exhibit and a pepper festival going on at the same time.
    As always the Garden was a slice of heaven, and not just for the plants. People of all ages, races, languages. "I'm not sure what that is—Romanian?" I whispered to my wife as we passed some murmuring Eastern European tongue. Lots of Russian, of Japanese. Babies in carriages, old folks in wheelchairs. A white, grandfatherly sort with white hair put a loving arm around an African-American boy, maybe 12, in a bright green soccer uniform and they ambled, talking. My fingers itched to whip out my iPhone and take a picture, but I decided not to intrude. Maybe taking an hour like this, to get away, is just another example of White Privilege. If it is, so be it, it was my privilege to take it and I am not ashamed to do so. This is how the world should be for everyone, how it could be, if we'd only let it

"Red Hot" variety lily. 

The Tea Party's man feints to the Left.

     To be honest, I did not know former Congressman Joe Walsh had a radio show, and never would have thought of him again for the rest of my life had not he posted a particularly brainless tweet in the wake of the Dallas police shootings, seeming to threaten the president and declaring a state of "war." 
    I remembered vaguely meeting him in a coffee shop four years ago, and thought it would be diverting on a Sunday to dig that column out. My apologies if it's overkill — with the way the news is going, I'll have some new horror to react to by this afternoon.
    Until then, notice how he blames the abortion issue on liberals, as if the Right trying to strip away reproductive rights from women were a Democratic plot. The general sense of squishiness and blame-shifting should be reminiscent of another Republican flash-in-the-pan currently enjoying his moment on the stage. 

     Rep. Joe Walsh is a charming man. Big, handsome smile, generous (at least to me), Walsh (R-8th) insists on paying for our drinks at the Starbucks on Delaware.
     And he has moxie ­— after I wrote a column about breakfast with Sen. Dick Durbin, Walsh was the lone politician to suggest the same.
     I will admit, meeting the Tea Party's darling was not high on my agenda. What the Tea Party represents — tear down the government out of an exaggerated concern for the deficit, oppress immigrants under the fig leaf of illegality, and in general try to drag the country back to a past that wasn't all that great the first time — is anathema to me. But why not talk?
     "Awfully nice of you!" he exudes.
     The Tea Party movement . . .
     "Here's the deal. There's such a misunderstanding of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement is a good thing only in that it has gotten the country talking again."
     Walsh talks fast, and it takes a moment for the "only" in the above to register.
     "No," he corrects himself. "I mean it's a better thing than that. The country is going through a revolution. What I mean by that is we're having a grand debate and an argument and a fight about our core principles."
     Reagan's epiphany was: Starve the government so we can cut these programs we hate that serve people we hate. That's what's happening.
     "What you and I both know is we've got 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. And they're not living until they're 63, they're living until they're 93. Politicians in both parties have been scared to frickin' death about how to pay for all that health care."
     What would be a fair amount to pay? What would be fair for Joe Walsh to pay in taxes?
     "I wanna say 'Yes, we should pay something.' I want a safety net, especially when it comes to health care."
     The question is, who pays for it?
     "If we don't figure that out, we're sunk financially. Come home from Afghanistan tomorrow. Get rid of the oil subsidies. Do all this stuff that I want to do and liberals want to do and it won't solve the debt problem. The biggest, fastest-growing piece of our budget is health-care costs for our aging population. Democrats don't want to touch it. They're scared to death. So here come Republicans."
     When it comes to women, suddenly you want an active government prying into citizens' lives.
     "The Tea Party movement, all we talk about, all we've focused on is the growth of government, all this spending, all this debt, and to a smaller degree our loss of perceived freedoms. I don't think we've been asked four times in the past two years about abortion."
     But it keeps coming up.
     "The other side's bringing it up. It's how they succeed, they think."
     Does that explain immigration, too? Because I seem to recall a lot of immigration talk at rallies.
     "I don't want to have a discussion what to do with 12 to 14 million living here until the government does the one thing it should do: Secure the border. You gotta stop the spigot. Right now, it's illegal to come over the border. I'm a limited-government guy, but use every resource we've got."
     Is it worth it? You're expending resources trying to stop something that's good for the U.S.
     He chewed on that. "You probably want the government to do a bit more than I do," he finally said. "One thing I want the government to do is enforce its laws. If it's not going to enforce its laws, it should change its laws."
     But wouldn't that be "amnesty"?
     "I hear what you're saying. I don't want my government to incentivize behavior."
     Such as by permitting of gay marriage?
     "I don't want my society recognizing any forms of marriage except for heterosexual marriage. End of story."
     Why?
     "I want my government acknowledging the best, most unique way for kids to grow up is through a two-person heterosexual marriage."
     What's that based on? Studies?
     "God yes!" he said, poking my arm — he does that a lot, driving his point home. "A man and woman! There are studies that show, when it comes to crime, education, drug use . . ."
     What studies? That just isn't true.
     "I will feed you studies. But the Tea Party doesn't talk about this. I've talked about this twice. Nobody talks about abortion. The Tea Party is 99 percent focused on the economic."
     It's been a week and I'm still waiting for those studies, which don't exist. Walsh is very dynamic. He believes — using facts if they're there, emotion and sleight of hand if they're not.
     "There's this notion that the Tea Party, we're these crazy cave men," he said. "All I'm trying to do is get us back to what I think this country was founded upon."
     I think it was founded upon life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet some people's happiness doesn't seem to count for much.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 12, 2012