Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake

Proof that we not only talk the talk, we walk the walk: Eli's cheesecakes set out for Ross's high school graduation party.

    Howdy folks. Enjoying the blog? Good, good. Glad you like it. I certainly enjoy writing it.
    Although. One drawback of the quality journalism you've come to expect here is that people tend to start reading, immediately, just jump right on in, and then are carried away, rapt, into my column, and perhaps never notice the advertisement on the side.
    Can't blame them. There's only the one. But it is an important one.
    So I'd like to direct your attention to the left, to the new December ad by the blog's sponsor, Eli's Cheesecake. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the company site where you'll be able to order tasty, wholesome, nutritious Eli's cheesecake for yourself, your friends and your family.
    Why? Well, because it's delicious, for starters. But more than that. We live in perilous times. And as our nation deteriorates into a disordered, Manichean and uncivilized place, we are going to increasingly rely on the relief offered by basic creature comforts such as Eli's cheesecake. As difficult as it is to see Trump naming a Mardi Gras parade of fanatics, wash-outs and incompetents to his cabinet, as painful as it will be to see environmental regulations cast aside, Medicare gutted, and the civil liberties of Americans and hardworking immigrant residents ignored, the route ahead will be all the more challenging if there is nothing good in the house for dessert. The quality of our national discourse, our American pride and our cherished freedoms might slip, precipitously, but the quality of Eli's cheesecake? Never.
    So stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into by stunts such as talking to the Taiwanese president in contravention of 40 years of tradition. We might all be living on canned food and squirrels caught in snares in 2018. But right now you can survive on peppermint cheesecake — doesn't just the thought of that make the four-year infamy that our nation must endure just a little less of a doorjamb-gnawing flash of unspeakable woe?
    If not for yourself, think of your friends, perhaps in distant cities, still reeling at the stab to the soul that the past election represented, frightened folks whose bleak December days could be enlivened by a dark chocolate banana cheesecake from Eli's, or a salted caramel halavah cheesecake, or red velvet cheesecake.
    Wait. Back up. My God. Did I say salted caramel halavah cheesecake? I did. You've never had that in your life, have you? Admit it. You never even heard of it. But now that you have, you won't be able to get it out of your mind. Salted. Caramel. Halavah. Cheesecake.
    Though the enticing effect might be lessened among those who don't quite know what halavah is (fantastic candy made of ground sesame seeds adored by us swarthy Semitic tribes).  Just the thought of salted caramel halavah cheesecake is the spark relighting the beacon of hope that was recently extinguished by the political micturition of 60 million fellow citizens. America didn't reach this point by caving into tyrants, foreign OR domestic. We approach life with the same sense of possibility that lead us, in only 50 years, from the bland yellow disc of a Sara Lee cheesecake to the multi-cultural splendor and deliciousness of an Eli's Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake, which you can order right now by clicking here. Do it for yourself or, if not for yourself, for a friend or, if those two imposing beneficiaries don't shake open your wallet, do it for me. I write this stuff every day without asking you to do anything but read it and, now, to buy a cheesecake. For yourself. For a friend. Or hell, for me. Send me the Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake. 
    Because even if you can no longer rely on the president or the press, on Congress or the basic decency of your neighbors, this blog and Eli's cheesecake will never let you down. And that's something.

Rising of The Chicago Sun in 1941 casts shadows today

     

     The most surprising thing is how familiar it all feels.
     Not the cover price: 2 cents. Nor the mobs of Chicagoans who waited in the streets at midnight to throw their pennies at harried newsboys and strip bundles of newspapers off the trucks before they stopped rolling. Certainly not the mayor and the governor and the three newsreel cameras on hand to watch the presses roll.

The known world, according to Col .McCormick

     But 75 years ago this Sunday, when The Chicago Sun, the predecessor of this newspaper, hit the streets in the early hours of Dec. 4, 1941, war might have been raging from the British Isles to Moscow to Malaysia. But people were still people, Americans were still Americans, cynical, divided, contentious, patriotic, devious concerning what was not yet called The Mainstream Media, treating it as both quarterback and tackling dummy.
     The Sun was a paper with a purpose: to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his conviction that we had to get involved in a war that Americans wanted to avoid. A Gallup poll found 88 percent of Americans were against fighting the Nazis. What debate there was focused on how much we should help our allies and how prepared we should be -- half felt we needed to mobilize for the inevitable; the other half felt that doing so would only antagonize Mr. Hitler.
    In Chicago, Col. Robert McCormick ran his Tribune as the voice of isolation, a kind of 1940s Fox News. The Trib was "savage in its attacks upon all liberals and everyone with whom it disagreed" according to media critic Oswald Garrison Villard, who noted the Tribune endorsed the Klu Klux Klan while taking a dim view of these unwashed foreigners some thought we ought to  shed American blood to protect.
     "On international questions the Tribune has generally been cynical, reactionary, militaristic and jingo," Villard noted in 1943, explaining how McCormick's idea of sane foreign policy was to annex Mexico "without hesitation" in order to "impose our superior morality upon the Mexicans," and that a United Nations was unnecessary since other countries could merely join the U.S. as new states — white countries, of course.
     The Trib was only the most extreme of the four Chicago papers. At the august Daily News, the publisher, Frank Knox, backed the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee, a front group secretly backed by the German government, insisting, in a very Trumpian fashion, that European nations settle the $14 billion they still owed the U.S. from WWI before any further assistance was considered. The Chicago Times was a scrappy, pro-FDR tabloid, but considered a photo-driven lightweight. And the American was a Hearst rag obsessing over ax murders and love nests.
     Into this strode our unlikely hero, Marshall Field III. Inheritor of nearly $200 million in 1940 dollars, he had a 13,000-acre plantation in South Carolina, a six-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue, a summer home in Maine, a yacht, a third wife, and a guilty liberal conscience. In 1940, he founded PM, a New York city newspaper that raised eyebrows by being printed on quality paper stock and refusing to accept advertising.
     A newspaper needs a name, and a contest was held. The winner, Russell Trenholme, received $5,000 for "The Chicago Sun," explaining his entry: "When morning comes you look for two things to make your world right: you look for the sun and sunlight, and you look for your morning paper for the truth of what's going on in the world."
     The paper was greeted with delight in Washington. "Isn't this wonderful?" FDR gushed, waving a copy — and with fanatical opposition by the Trib, which not only threatened news vendors who dared carry it, but blackballed the Sun from joining the Associated Press, a case that went up to the Supreme Court.
     Others were less hostile, though noting that neither international news nor editorial direction were what made or broke a newspaper.
     "The future of the Chicago Sun might ultimately depend upon some little comic-strip twirp presenting as much nauseating morality . . . as Little Orphan Annie," Edwin A. Lahey wrote in the Daily News.
     That first issue sold 263,000 copies. Three days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That edition sold 896,000 copies, but the Sun's main reason for being vanished overnight, as the Tribune spun on a dime and was as enthusiastic for war as it had been for accommodating Hitler.
     The Sun soldiered on, though it never made money, a reminder that hard times in the newspaper business are not new either (the Villard quote comes from a 1943 book entitled "The Disappearing Daily"). The Sun merged with the Times early in 1948, making this paper, through its second bloodline, older than the Tribune, since the Times is a descendent of the Chicago Journal, founded in 1844.
     One more point before we let the Sun set for another 25 years.
     The headline on that first edition of the Sun, a broadsheet, was "REVOLT GROWS IN SERBIA."
     The Tribune's headline that day was: "F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS!"
     An isolationist Army captain had stolen contingency plans from the War Plans Division and passed them on to arch-isolationist Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, who gave them to the Tribune, which brandished them as "irrefutable evidence that that American intervention in the war was planned and imminent." The Germans adjusted their own strategy accordingly.
     Which eerily echoes WikiLeaks, with one very, very important distinction. After the war plans were published, the White House was asked what action would be taken against those publishing the state secrets.
     "Your right to print the news is, I think, unchallenged and unquestioned," White House press secretary Stephan Early said. "It depends entirely on the decision of the publisher and editor whether publication is patriotic or treasonable."

Coercion won't create respect for Old Glory

     

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, July 4, 2009

     There is sincere debate whether Donald Trump goes on these Twitter rants because he lacks impulse control, or as a fiendishly clever ploy to distract the media from his more significant lapses. 

     I vote for the former. Donald Trump is many things, but a genius he is not. Nor is he disciplined. He manipulates the media merely by being who he is, not by pretending to be who he's not.  To suspect otherwise is to confuse result with intent. The media loses focus on what's significant—assuming anything matters at this point, which might be a false assumption—the way a dog is distracted by a darting squirrel. It isn't as if the squirrel darts for the purpose of catching the attention of dogs. 
     Not that you can blame the media too much for noticing what the president-elect says. His suggestion that flag burners lose their citizenship or go to jail is jaw-dropping, or would be, if our jaws weren't already lolling on the floor. We settled this issue years ago. I don't even have to write about it anymore. But it is an interesting issue; here's a column nearly two decades old. 

     In Boy Scouts, they teach you the flag rules. How to hoist a flag. How to lower it and fold it so it doesn't touch the ground.
     The rules are based purely on respect. If the tip of the flag touches the ground, they don't kick you out of scouting. That would be dumb.
     This is the only way the rules could work. If failing to properly fold the flag into a little triangle could get you sent to jail, nobody would touch a flag. And anyway, there is no coercion necessary. You honor the flag, willingly, because it is the right thing to do.
     This isn't enough for some people, apparently. Honor is a delicate idea, and they would rather put some muscle behind it, to nab the few deviants who don't follow along. It is a craven and cowardly way to think.
     But popular. Last week, 310 Congressboobs in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to belch forth yet another proposed flag amendment to the Constitution, to punish those who "desecrate" the flag.
     The showboat patriots and fascist wannabes let out a whoop, while those who cherish American ideals dropped their heads in shame and prayed for the Senate to bail us out, again, just as it did two years ago.
     Supporters of this bill are like the men who, wanting to be admired by their wives, go home and say, "Honey, show me respect or I'll belt you in the mouth." That's one way to do it, but odds are it won't raise their status at home and most likely will hurt it.
     Every statement made by supporters of the flag amendment disintegrates when reason is applied to it.
     "It is an act of contempt," said Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.). "Flag burning is no more free speech than a child's temper tantrum."
     Exactly. And a child's temper tantrum is free speech. Only an idiot would try to ban them. First, because such a ban wouldn't prevent a single child from throwing a fit in the supermarket when Mom won't buy fudge Pop-Tarts.
     And second, there isn't a problem. Tantrums are a speck in the fabric of life, momentarily embarrassing but without lasting consequence.
     Ditto for flag burners. A tiny, pathetic handful of unwashed radicals burn flags, to show that they've never been abroad and don't realize what a wonderful country this is. It is such a rarity that, when TV grabbed for clips of flag burning last week, half of them were in black and white.
     So, the geniuses behind this flag amendment suggest, to solve this non-crisis, we're going to mess with the Constitution. To fiddle with something so important over a triviality boggles the mind — it's like having your garage door opener implanted in your chest, next to your heart, so you don't lose it.
     Why not legislate against bad breath? Write a constitutional amendment barring hairy fat men from wearing strap T-shirts. They're objectionable, too, and far more common than flag burners.
     This amendment isn't American. Burn a flag in Saudi Arabia, and they might cut your hands off. Burn a flag in China and you might never get out of prison. Are their flags grander than ours, because we protect ours only with an intangible such as respect? I don't think so.
     Freedom is a mixed blessing, but it beats the alternative. As bad as it is to find a wad of Doublemint stuck to your shoe, it is worse to live in Singapore, where the jackboot "democracy" bans chewing gum.
     The worst thing about this bill is that its only result will be a spate of flag burnings. People who would never dream of burning a flag — myself included — will wonder if perhaps their patriotic duty now demands them to take the extreme step, lest some other form of speech be banned next year.
     That's why I'm grateful for the idea suggested by my friend John Scalzi, the resident wit at America Online. He reacted to the last flag amendment by proposing to market a flag with 49 stars and call it I Can't Believe It's Not the American Flag. That way, people could protest the law by burning this near-flag while not forced to burn a real one.
     Would burning a Not the American Flag be a crime? It isn't the flag, because it's one star short. But it would look very much like the flag. Once it was on fire, nobody would count the stars and the message still would get across.
     The beauty of the Not the American Flag concept is that it shows the moral emptiness of this proposed flag amendment, the idiocy of those who argue that burning a flag isn't speech, protected by law.
     The U.S. flag is not an object with 50 stars. It isn't a thing, but rather an idea. It's the idea behind a flag that makes people upset when flags burn; not the cloth, not the stars.
     What the dolts in Congress don't realize is that you cannot burn an idea. America is fireproof. You can't diminish her with a match.
     This isn't the first time people have eroded liberties in the name of freedom. In the 1950s, we were so afraid of the Soviets, we imposed Soviet-style repression to combat them. As if we already had been conquered.
     It was shameful then, and even more shameful now, since we aren't faced with a powerful enemy. Just ourselves, and the truth that there are people who hate their own country and feel the need to denounce it. A hundred new amendments to the Constitution won't change that.
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 15, 1997

 

"You shall not follow the masses in doing evil."

     Bigotry is bad but not for the reason people assume — or not just for that reason. It isn't bad merely because innocent people are harmed by the irrational hatreds carried around by the prejudiced and by the random cruelties those hatreds inspire.
     Bigotry also harms the bigot, since it is a form of ignorance, a misapprehension of the world. They see not what is in front of them, but what is in front of them filtered through the distorting lens of the disdain they grew up with or slid into. Their world is colored not by what's before their eyes but by the jumbled mess behind them.
     So they make mistakes.
     For instance: eliminating the DREAM Act, which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to do on his first day as president — Jan. 21, for those keeping track. That would keep up to 5 million young Americans off the path to success, in school and employment, for a very Third Reich reason: because their papers aren't in order. It will, of course, hurt them, making their lives harder, more complicated, more anxious. It would also hurt the country. A country which, contrary to the bigot's skewed perspective, is not burdened by foreigners but benefits from them. A country that needs every capable person it can get its hands on. Otherwise we end up like Japan, in a demographic death spiral.
     Cutting off your nose to spite your face is a hallmark of bigots. The classic example is after courts ordered public pools integrated in the 1960s, Southern towns closed their pools, even filling them in with dirt rather than risk whatever horror was supposed to come from letting blacks into the pool — interracial dating, I suppose.
     That's the bad news. The good news, if any news can be considered good in this perilous moment of our national saga, is that, because of their myopia, bigots screw up and overlook important considerations....

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Give to The Night Ministry

     Our Illinois leaders have been trying to balance the state financial crisis on the backs of the poor and disabled, which means cuts for vital social services and long waits for charitable groups to get paid.  I don't support many social services, but The Night Ministry is different: they are the last defense, the final safety net between Chicagoans who have nothing and utter misery. It provides the most basic needs: food, water, medical attention.

     November 29 has been dubbed "Giving Tuesday" and I hope you will consider visiting The Night Ministry's Giving Tuesday page and making a donation.  

    I already have, and it feels good. This is a time when individual participation is even more important. The situation is only going to get worse as a particularly heartless and brutal form of Republicanism takes over in Washington. How many homeless people have you passed by where you wanted to give them money, but weren't sure it would help them? Money given to The Night Ministry directly benefits homeless people, particularly LGBTQ youth, who are especially vulnerable, as outlined in this story from 2012.

     It's 9 p.m., and 26 young men and women have shown up at the Crib, a shelter for homeless youth in the Lake View Lutheran Church at Addison and Halsted.
     Which is a problem, since there is space for only 20 foam mattresses on the floor of the cinderblock community room where they will sleep.
     "Most nights we're full," says Nate Metrick, the Crib coordinator. "Especially in winter, we're pretty much full every night."
     Or in spring when it feels like winter — it's 42 degrees outside tonight. So staff from the Night Ministry, the nonprofit organization that runs the shelter, along with many other outreach services, feeding and providing for Chicago's downtrodden, does what they are forced to do most cold nights: turn people away.
     "There's a lot of you here tonight," announces staffer Hope Benson, after quieting down the commotion. "We start a new intake process today. When I came outside I noticed there was a lot of running. There's no need to run. Intake is between 8:45 and 9 o'clock. You can be here between that time and we'll still let you in. Okay? If there's more than 20 people, then we're going to do a lottery, like we're going to do now."
     There is a burst of protest, excited conversation and drama, with nearly everyone speaking at once.
     "Yesterday was first come/first serve," says one. "What happened?" "This is messed up!" says another.
     They are black, white, Hispanic, male, female. All under the age of 24. They sit on chairs, stand against walls, slump on the floor, their possessions piled around them.
     Darnell, a powerfully built 19-year-old with aqua-painted fingernails, clutches a pink stuffed monkey to his chest. "This is J-Moe," he says. About 70 percent of the youth who stay at the Crib are gay, lesbian or transgender, and there is a direct connection between homosexuality and homelessness among the young.
     "Youth are coming out at a much younger age — 12, 13," says Paul Hamann, the Night Ministry's CEO and president. "Youth see society being more accepting and are willing to come out early, but the family might not be ready for that, which sometimes puts their housing in danger. It's a little paradoxical."
     Nor does anyone have an idea how many homeless youth are in Chicago or in the country. "There are no numbers out there," Hamann says.
     Benson draws slips of paper out of a white plastic bucket and reads off 20 names or nicknames: John. Phillip. Diggie. Romeo. Izzy. Desiree. Darnell. Ryan. Dee. Temper. Knox. Cory. Conrad. Red. Dan. Leo. Homary, Dougie. Adrianne. Cain."
     "Can I say something please?" says Leo, 19, standing up. "Motherfuckers who have somewhere to go, who think the Crib is just a hangout spot, get the fuck out, because there are people who really need this place. I'm just saying. You all being selfish."
     A common complaint: Other people don't need it but I do. Also theft.
     The six whose names don't get picked get CTA cards with $2.50 — one fare — on them, and they're lucky to get that; somebody has to donate the cards to the Crib, which began as a pilot program with the city of Chicago in January 2011, ran for four months, was closed, then re-opened in September. Its future is uncertain.
     "We are trying to come up with additional funds to keep it open year-round in a very, very tough funding environment," says Hamann. (The Crib receives donations at the Night Ministry, 4711 N. Ravenswood, 60640, or at thenightministry.org).
     The fare cards are last-resort housing. "Most homeless people, at night time they sleep on the train," explains Conrad Burnett, 22, who sometimes does that. "It's an hour and half, two hours from 95th to Howard, back and forth and back and forth. It's warm on the train. You get used to it, sitting up sleeping. You gotta hold all your bags. They'll cut your pants and take what's in your pockets. They took my shoes one time."
     Though warm, a night on the train isn't an appealing prospect.
     "I have nowhere to go!" complains Tobias, 22, a muscular young man with a slight beard and an earring. Homeless almost a year, he stops at the door to argue, loud and long — they shouldn't use the lottery, they should keep the old system. "You knew I was here!" he shouts over staffers. "No! No! You're not listening to what I'm saying! The first 20 who got in are the first 20 who are supposed to stay in!"
     "We only have 20 spots," says Benson, explaining the need for a change. "People push past others. It's dangerous. People get hurt."
     Getting nowhere, Tobias kicks angrily at the crash bar on the door. It locks behind him and he is standing on Addison Street, holding a bag of pumpkin seeds.
     "I don't know what I'm going to do," he says.
     Joddy, 18, kisses her boyfriend, Dougie, 24, hard, then quietly leaves — he was picked; she wasn't. She walks a block west, uses her fare card to get into the Addison Street L station, where she stands on the platform, a slight girl in a red-plaid hooded sweatshirt, pressing herself against the wall, looking scared.
     "What am I going to do?" she cries, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I don't know where to go."
     She won't say why she's homeless. "That's confidential to me."
     Nor will she risk riding the 'L' all night. She's done that before.
     "It's sometimes dangerous, especially if you're a girl," she says. "There's a lot of guys, who'll just hit on you. It's dangerous. It's not easy. You get scared, because it's late, and you don't know where to go."
     Joddy grew up in Humboldt Park. "I'm mixed, I'm a lot of races — Native American, Puerto Rican, Irish." She has been homeless since she was 16 and went to Evanston Township High School. "I couldn't finish. I had to drop out," she says.
     She insists that she and her boyfriend watch out for each other. "We have each other's back." But she couldn't let him pass up his spot at the Crib to stick with her on the streets. "He can't — I can't let him do that," she says. "He suffers more than I do."
     So what is she going to do?
     "I don't know. Walk down North Avenue. It's actually a lot safer there than a lot of places.... I tend to walk a lot. Every day. Once I walked almost eight miles."
     She talks about the various Northside youth services and shelters she uses, and how homeless youth are sometimes treated.
     "I been in Chicago my whole life, and I've been growing up around here, and I've grown up to see everything," she says. "I'm a very observant person. I see everything. I don't have to say anything. But I see it. And I see how they disrespect everybody. Everybody who doesn't look rich or doesn't have class."
     She has ambitions. "I'm a really good artist. I can draw," she says, hoping to be "an artist maybe, a comic book artist." But she sees how she and her friends are viewed by many in society.
    "Homeless people are human too," she says. "We got lives, too. Just 'cause you have money in your pocket, just 'cause you have clothes on your back and a job doesn't mean that you can go ahead and say that a person's not human. That person has feelings, too. That person went through bullshit too. We went through abuse. We went through all this shit, and you know why? Because it's people that hurt people. It's not people who do this to themselves. Especially the young ones, who don't even deserve this. And that's coming out from some real experiences of my own. You can't just say people are not people because they don't have anything. Nobody has everything in the world. Nobody is perfect."
    The train arrives. "Belmont is next" the canned voice calls. "Doors open on the right at Belmont." She walks onto the train and is gone.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 30, 2012

C'mon, pitch in, I can't buy presents for ALL these kids!

  

     Modesty demands that we truly generous individuals refrain from bragging about our good works. So I've never written about founding the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust's "Letters to Santa" program, nor about my purchasing countless presents for Chicago children, nor about prodding my reluctant colleagues to get off their kiesters and pitch in which, to their credit, they generally do, eventually.
     But it's a big city, and we need help. Last year the program gave more than 10,000 children Christmas presents. I can't buy them all. So while I'm gathering gifts for the, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six ... 27 needy kids I've taken under my wing this year, I'm hoping that you'll pause from staring, stupefied with distress, at the day's political headlines and make Christmas brighter for just one child who, believe it or not, has it tougher than you do.
     Oh, that isn't true. Well, the getting gifts for 10,000 kids part is, as well as the hoping you'll join part.
     Otherwise, for the record, a) I did not start the Letters to Santa Program. b) My colleagues leap to help, far quicker than I do. And c) it's a big deal for me to buy a few gifts for one child, never mind tackle 27.
     But I figured, blatant lies are in vogue. If Donald Trump can hold a gala promising veterans millions of dollars, ballyhooing his supposed generosity, then fail to cough up a dime of his own until the lying media points out the lapse, and almost half the country votes for him anyway, then why not puff myself up as a philanthropist? Worrying about the actual truth has become an antique pastime, like churning butter.

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Sweet gratitude

      Thanksgiving's over—it really worked at the old Steinberg household this year. About two dozen people, including two I'd never met before, a friend of a relative and a friend of a friend of a relative. I love that. It makes me feel like Papa Hemingway, to have this big old house filled with people, talking and eating and drinking and laughing. 
    Sure, we were all a little shell-shocked over the past election. But not too much. I latched onto a Comforting Historical Fact: the election of Lyndon B. Johnson as president in 1964 more or less doomed 50,000 American servicemen to die in Vietnam. Only nobody knew it, then, and we don't really view it that way now. And Johnson was a pretty good president, and Nixon, Watergate notwithstanding, is credited with going to China and such, and neither man is blamed for this incredible loss of young American life over a fear that did not prove valid. 
    At least with Trump, we have eyes wide open—goggled-eyed in sheer amazed horror, maybe. But certainly forewarned, for all the good that will do. 
     Though let's not get lost in the political weeds today. I really wanted to talk about thanks, giving thanks, not just to God or some unspecified good providence, but to specific people. I was so occupied trying to set the proper It's-still-a-country-worth-giving-thanks-for-even-if-we-elected-a-boob tone when I gave my speech of thanks, I forgot to thank my wife, who worked for three days preparing the feast. Sorry honey. Though I suspect that is a common oversight—we're so worked up over the big picture we forget to focus on the important stuff right in front of us. 
    So if you are having a hard time in the year to come—as I imagine most thinking, caring, patriotic Americans might—considering making yourself feel better by thanking somebody.
    In words, if nothing else. But also consider a more tangible thanks. During the two years my co-author Sara Bader and I were locking down legal permissions for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the mountain of paperwork, the contracts and rights payments, were handled by Rodney Powell at the University of Chicago Press. It really was our responsibility, but he just stepped in and gave us a hand. So Sara and I tried to express our gratitude in a tangible way, by dispatching brownie hearts from Misericordia's Hearts & Flour Bakery, and sour cream coffee cake from Zingerman's and macarons from Botega Louie in Los Angeles.  I can't speak for how it made him feel, but it made me very happy.  I came to think of it as "Dispatching the Gratitude Sweets."

Young Charles Percy

    Not to forget our holiday advertiser, now in its fourth season on Everygoddamnday, Eli's Cheesecake. I have a reader who points out typos almost every single day, and as thanks I offered to send him a cheesecake. He demurred, but asked instead that I send it to his grandson in Seattle, Charles Percy, great-grandson of our late senator of the same name. So I sent the lad a cake.
      I don't know how this world is supposed to be, but if even a tiny part of it involves babies being dispatched cheesecake by grateful strangers in distant cities as thanks for their grandfather's grammatical and orthographic skills, well, that's getting to be the sort of world that meets my approval. 
    What if you have nobody to thank? That is a puzzlement. Maybe you aren't thinking hard enough. Maybe you need to expand the range of ideas that can be conveyed with sweets—they're also great at apology. I wrote something unfair about a neighbor last month, and decided to deliver my apology note in one of BasketWorks gift baskets, which seemed a sign of sincerity, and was gratefully accepted as such. Dispatching the basket was one of the highlights of an otherwise dismal year. 
     And if you have nobody to thank, and nobody to apologize to? That is worrisome. Maybe you need to send the basket to yourself. 

Being white helps ... a lot.

Kevin Lavin at Guildhaus

     The complex, unvarnished truth and a feel-good finish are enemies. Which is why sometimes space limitations can be a reader's friend, if not a writer's.
     Earlier this week, when I finished saying all I wanted to say about my interview with Kevin Lavin, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict and the executive director at Guildhaus, the Blue Island halfway house, I had a column 1,300 words long—the length of a two-page spread. Knowing that would probably never happen, I cut it back to 940 words and hoped it might get squeezed onto a page on Wednesday. But my bosses wanted to save it for Page Two Friday, meaning it had to be 700 words long, which is how long the finished column ran.
      When you have to cut a piece of writing that much, you lose nuance. Tales of Guidlhaus' colorful founder, Jack King, for instance, or how difficult a heroin habit was to overcome: an average of five rehab stays and 10 detoxes, according to Lavin. Didn't make the final cut, because I had to preserve the thrust of the story—Lavin's dramatic flight from the cops, and the caring officer who was more interested in helping than busting him.
     You also lose entire avenues of thought. As soon as Lavin started telling me about phoning his guardian police officer every Thanksgiving, I knew that would be my hook for the holiday. But I also had a qualm, which I raised even as he was praising the police officer.
     "...every Thanksgiving I call him," Lavin said. "He's just a great guy. He didn't charge me for fleeing and eluding. He had me for four or five felonies. He threw the drugs out I had."
     "Why do you think he did that?" I asked.
    "Because he saw me as a human being that was hurting. He saw me as a father and a decent guy. This guy stayed and talked to me for 13 hours. We talked about life."
     I couldn't resist: "And being white helped."
     Lavin, plain-spoken and not one to mince words, didn't argue.
    "If I were a black guy, I'd be in the system still," he said. 

Kevin Lavin

    Later in the conversation, the subject came back up, again discussing the heroin epidemic. 

     "We're finally coming to attention, prevention, and not detention," he said.
     "And a reason for that is it's happening to white kids in the suburbs," I pointed out.
     "It's the only fucking reason," Lavin said. "Because Tommy who lives in Orland in a $3 million house, got caught. Tommy ain't going to jail. He's going to get bought out. But if it's Lil' Tommy in Englewood, he's going to jail because he doesn't have the measly thousand dollars to bond himself out. It's insane."
    To be honest, that was not quite the "It's a Wonderful Life" ending I had hoped for. But it seemed too true to leave out.  "Insane" was the word. 
    But we weren't getting to 699 words with it there. So I cut it, feeling bad about polishing reality to perhaps too bright a sheen. And I felt worse when the most common reader reaction was celebrating seeing a story that paints cops in a positive light, often from readers pausing first to point out how they never read me because of my blistering biases but had somehow stumbled upon this column anyway and were pleased to see me straying into the realm of reality as they understood it.

     "The policeman in Alsip upheld his oath to serve and protect by giving a young man a 2nd chance by analyzing the situation and realizing that by intervening he could do more by counseling him then charging him," a reader in Homewood observed. "I always believed that the main issue with crime is not race but relationships between police and the public.
     Which is not what this episode, laid out in full, really illustrates. Kevin Lavin's police officer savior certainly deserves praise. But he isn't evidence the system works. The bad thing isn't that Kevin Lavin was treated as a person and given a break. The bad thing is that guys with black skin, guys who are as human as Kevin Lavin but who find themselves in crisis, often don't get that kind of break. They get a bullet. 

    

Giving thanks to the cop who didn't shoot

Kevin Lavin, Executive Director of Guildhaus in Blue Island; above him is a photo of founder Jack King.

     Everyone has a Thanksgiving tradition: the kindergarten crayon hand outline turkey decorations, the touch football game in a nearby field. Me, I made my famous challah stuffing, a big warm pan of savory comfort. It was a hit, as always.
     And Kevin Lavin called the cops, as he has every Thanksgiving Day for the past 13 years.
     Not just any cops; one particular Alsip police officer named . . . well, I can't say, for reasons that will become clear.

Guildhaus is next door to the Maple Tree Inn,
a popular Blue Island bar

  Lavin is the executive director of Guildhaus, a Blue Island residential treatment center for recovering alcoholics and addicts — or, lately, make that for recovering addicts and alcoholics, as the heroin epidemic has flipped the recovery world around.
     "Things have changed," says Lavin, sitting in his office at Guildhaus, in the shadow of Western Avenue, across from the Cal-Sag Channel. "From 1987 to 1995, there were alcoholics, for the most part, a little cocaine. From '95 to 2002 it was crack cocaine. Insane. A few alcoholics here and there. Now my demographic is heroin addicts: 80 percent. You know where they're from? Everywhere. Not the picture you think: 22 to 28, from well-to-do families, good families."

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Members of the Guildhaus have their own coffee mugs.

Family: Thanksgiving's mixed blessing

     This Thanksgiving is going to be a strange one. Then again, they're always strange ones. I dug back into the closet for this chestnut from 1998 because, well, I didn't feel like writing anything. Try not to fight about politics. We always go around my Thanksgiving table and give thanks, and while I typically go last, this year I'm going first, to set the tone, because I don't want a bunch of pouty faces giving thanks that they live in a country that would clamp its eyes shut and elect a fraud and a liar who is going to take us on a tour of the darkest regions of the American nightmare. 
    None of that! I'm going to start by saying that I'm thankful that I live in the United States of America, a great country where the people living there always, always, always had to struggle to see who gets to steer. A country that is not great because it never erred, never went sailing off into the deep weeds, as it has done now. But stayed great because we always found a way back. We survived the Civil War and the Red Scare. We'll survive this, and for that I am thankful in advance. 

     Maybe the whole Thanksgiving feast is a bribe. That wonderful home-baked turkey? Bribe. The savory fresh stuffing? Bribe. The pies? Bribe.
     Why else is this particular feast denied to us all year long? Why, if a friend served you that same menu in August, would you find it very strange?
     The reason, perhaps, is that it would be puncturing the longed-for prod that gets us moving, almost unwilling (and in some cases, definitely unwillingly), toward home.
     Going home is often hard. That's worth saying despite all of the opposing hype, the smarmy TV ads showing joyous embraces at airports, happy shouts of welcome ringing out in the crisp New England air.
     Nice work if you can get it. If that's you this season, if you are reading this at the airport, tapping the crystal of your watch and wishing the minutes would go by so you can find yourself again in the warm soup of love that is your family -- well, then count yourself among the blessed. You have more than just turkey to be thankful for.
     If that isn't you, don't feel like a freak. Lots of people are in the same boat. Almost everyone I know returns to their families with a certain hesitation, like a person reaching into a dark space to see if there are snakes.
     Me, I've been lucky these past 15 years to go to Thanksgiving at my in-laws in Skokie, who actually do have one of those Kodak home-for-the-holidays clans, with everybody going around the table and saying why they are thankful, and no ugly episodes to regret, and no misbehaving black sheep to worry about.
     Unless that's me. I sometimes worry that I'm the scary uncle, frightening my nieces by quizzing them about school, exhibiting a little too much gusto at the feast and a little too much interest in the wine, then sprawling on the sofa, flushed and sated and slightly grotesque.
     I hope not. I remember that sort of uncle from my own Grim Thanksgivings Past, heaping Cool Whip on his pumpkin pie while his soon-to-be-ex-wife gave him a look that would bore a hole through a steel plate.
     Am I the only person who, even in happy times, feels the need to grope back toward dismal Thanksgivings past?
     There was one classic Thanksgiving of Doom I remember, cringing, every year.
     My Grandma Sarah had just died. She was the star around whom the solar system of my own family revolved. She had always made the feast. She served it. You could barely get her to sit down. My mother and her sisters would beg her, "Mother! Mother, sit down!" But she would keep bustling until, it seemed, someone grabbed her and held her in her chair.
     The year she died, the star went out, and the planets just flew off into space. There was one disastrous attempt, by my mother, at a Thanksgiving. It was like a horror movie. My central memory of that meal is the sound of clicking silverware punctuating the oppressive silence. Every now and then, someone would lob an attempt at conversation, but it would disappear into the heavy mist.
     What's important to remember this time of year is that things change, from good to bad and back again. If you are not having the best Thanksgiving, if you are reading this to drown out the argument in the next room, have hope. Who knows what a year will bring? Next year could find you in that happy place you've always wanted to be.
     Or if you are one of the lucky ones, enjoying the dream Thanksgiving we all want to enjoy, then I'll tell you what I do at every Thanksgiving dinner.  
     I wait until all the ingredients are assembled on the plate -- the turkey, the stuffing, the sweet potatoes, the cranberry sauce. I gaze down at the plate, then around at each of the faces at the table, hard, trying to fix them in my mind, to remind myself that they're here, and I'm here.
     And then I give thanks.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 26, 1998.

Trying to climb out of the Trump morass

     "Are we gonna be okay?" said the Metra conductor, punching my ticket.
    "We always have been," I replied, because what else are you going to say? "No?" I have no flippin' idea. I'm not the Delphic Oracle. 
    At least I was sincere; I might gaze into the abyss good and long, but then I lean toward optimism. I feel obligated to examine the negatives—and after this most astounding of presidential elections, you don't need much imagination to see things going into the weeds and fast. But why feel miserable about bad stuff that might never come?
    It's early yet. Yes, Trump promised a bunch of things that are some combination of a) immoral; b) harmful; c) evil; d) impossible.
    But Trump has a proven history of saying almost anything, of making promises then denying them. At this point, that is a strength. His saying that, after a year of promising to put Hillary Clinton in jail, nah, he isn't going to do that, well, it felt like springtime.
    There have been a lot of people buttonholing me, to talk. Even a pair of librarians at Northbrook Public Library,  when I stopped to return a book Tuesday night, gathered around to parse the situation. We were more or less flabbergasted, but holding up, and talking helped.
    "Their reward for enduring the awful experience,"  J.K. Rowling writes in The Casual Vacancy "was the right to tell people about it."
    A colleague stopped me at the paper.
    He asked, What about this video of neo-Nazis in Washington, D.C., exulting over Trump's election? Two hundred people! I thought he meant, "200, and that's a lot," but he meant just the opposite. Two hundred isn't very many neo-Nazis at all, he said. Why was the media even covering it?
    Well ... I said, maybe because a bunch of bigots and far right haters are goose-stepping into the White House. That creates a sensitivity. And two hundred may not be a lot, but it's not nothing. Maybe next week it'll be 500.
    He wasn't quite following me, so I tried a metaphor.
   "It's as if the doctor found a malignant lump on your arm," I said, "It being real small wouldn't be that important. You still wouldn't say, 'But the rest of me isn't cancer so I'm fine!' You'd watch that small lump very carefully. That's the situation here."
     No need to slide into panic or depression. That doesn't help. The immediate threat is from, not Trump or the government, but the sidewalk toughs and schoolyard bullies who are being emboldened, by the illusion that their worldview isn't horrendous, who feel free to abuse whoever is before them who seems a little different, blacks and Muslims and Hispanics. Not so much Jews and the handicapped, though I imagine that's coming. We need to see how these situations are treated--does the rung above the empowered deplorables, the local cops and school principals and such, stick with our view of American as a diverse nation, or do they get with the Trump program and wink at these offenses? My gut tells me the former. Though that could be hope talking.
     There is cause for alarm, but also cause for hope. On the phone with my older boy, Ross, over the weekend, whip smart and very political, I observed that he didn't seem at all anxious about the change in administration. Why?
    "We have strong institutions," he said. Not meaning, I should point out, mental institutions where these alt-right haters can be stuck after they are finished acting out in public. He meant the courts and the judiciary, the media and the police, the business community and what state, city and local governments haven't been too corrupted by the right wing mania against American rights. One mean-mouthed talking yam can't undo that overnight.
    That's an actual comfort. Trump can dog whistle haters all day long, and individuals will follow. But to turn the ship of state into the direction he's seems willing to have it go, well, that takes time and effort. Barack Obama, if you notice, never closed Guatanamo Bay, despite his promises. I have no doubt that Trump will try to do some awful things. But whether he succeeds is an open question, and while concern and alarm is natural, so is tentative optimism. We just don't know.
   

Unexpected benefits of the Trump era #3: A chance to get in shape.

    It was during Dave Edmund's "Get Out of Denver" that the endorphins kicked in. As if my brain said, "Ahhh" and smiled for the first time in two weeks.
    I was at the Northbrook Y Monday evening. Not a time I usually go -- it's better in the morning, before stuff starts happening.
    But I hadn't worked out that morning — talking on a New York radio show about the disastrous election. Hadn't since before Nov. 8 in fact--too busy, too tired, too dispirited. It was easy to sit for hours in front of the computer, absorbing the latest unimaginable development.
    But four years is a long time, and it hasn't even begun. We have to pace ourselves and settle in for the Long Haul Toward Trumpian Fascism. Since there is nothing you can do right now -- people are marching in the streets already, and that's fine, I suppose, but I'm holding off joining the protests until Trump begins implementing the folly he's promised. They'll need fresh reinforcements and it'll help to be in shape. When police turn the water cannons on the crowd, I might be a bit more nimble dodging behind a car for protection. And maybe I'll hit the ground just a little bit faster when the National Guard opens fire on the protesters.
     I'm not preaching tuning out, tempting as it is. You don't want to find out the trucks are coming for you by hearing their rumble down the street. That said, there is only so much bad news you can absorb, and fretting is not actually productive. Walk, run, swim, hike. The country won't go to hell any faster because you do 45 minutes on the elliptical, and you won't suffer as much. Exercise helps.
     As does music. I always blast music when I exercise. It also helps. In fact, I really can't enjoy exercise without it. Though in my regular workout mix tape I couldn't help notice odd echoes of the past election, from Anais Mitchell's "When the Chips Are Down" ("What you gonna do when the chips are down?/Nowwwww, that the chips are down") to Genesis' plodding "Squonk" ("If you don't stand up/You don't stand a chance.") Not to mention The Call's "I Still Believe."
     In 2010, I lost 30 pounds after a doctor told me that my sleep apnea would go away if I did. (It worked). Since then, a dozen pounds have crept back. My goal, by the end of 2017 to peel 20 more back. It won't keep the year from being The First Plague Year of Donald Trump. But I'll be a little more fleet of foot running from the New Brownshirts emboldened by Trump's embrace of white nationalism.
     So watch what you eat. There were lots of jokes about drinking your way through the Trump administration, and if I thought it would carve a second off his presidency, or diminish the odds of his utterly fucking up the country even by a percentage point or two, I'd be right there. But it wouldn't.
    Alas, it would be only me who'd get screwed up, and I have a sense we're going to need every single sound head and stout heart in the years to come. So eat that grapefruit. Snack on apples instead of candy. You never know when you'll have to run alongside a freight train as it picks up speed, trying to snag the outstretch hands of the other refugees, heading for Canada, who'll pull yourself into a boxcar.
    You've got time to prepare for that now;, don't spend it on the couch, bemoaning what is done and chain eating Mallomars. The news will unfold without you. I really felt the panic notch down during "Get Out of Denver" today. The good feeling lasted through the evening. It might ratchet back up tomorrow when Trump names Ted Nugent as Secretary of the Interior. But at least now I know where to go when it does.

   

Which are more dangerous, Muslims or gun owners?

     Radical Islamic Terror!
     An untraditional way to start. But these are untraditional times. And since Donald Trump fans obviously read this — trust me on that — and they seem to like hearing that phrase, why not keep them happy too?

   Again again, as the Teletubbies cry: Radical Islamic Terror!
     There, I said it twice. They must really like me now. President Obama, on the other hand, refuses to say it because he realizes that the whole purpose of the phrase is to weld these three concepts together. Republicans may be against gay marriage, but they’ll happily wed “Radical” to “Islamic” and “Islamic” to “Terror.”
     Yes, there is terror inspired by Islam. In their zeal to make those who disagree seem ridiculous, the GOP insists that not using the phrase means you are unaware there are terrorists who blame Islam for their actions.    

       Look at it this way: terrorists also have two legs, and mirrored left and right halves to their bodies — every single terrorist is like this, in fact — and yet we don’t scream “BIPED BILATERAL TERROR!” because that would draw white folk into the range of blame, which is what this exercise is really about: offloading responsibility for terror from those who commit it to innocent individuals who share their religion.

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Unexpected benefits of the Trump Era #2: A chance to be courageous.

    Growing up in the 1970s as I did, there was a sense that the great moments of history were behind us. In the 1960s, just disappearing over the horizon, there were Civil Rights to win, a Vietnam War to oppose, protests in the street, a chance to stand up and be counted. A chance to matter. The whole world was watching.
    And before that, World War II, when our parents' generation—"The Greatest Generation"—had Hitler to oppose, a world to free. Not a lot of soul-searching required when Nazis are taking over the world (actually, there was, one of those small details lost in popular history. A reminder that general public cowardice and folly are not ailments specific to our present day. Most of America would have shrugged and let the Axis have the rest of the globe, under the daft notion that we'd somehow be safe between our oceans. The Japanese did us a favor).
    With the advent of Donald Trump, and the wasp's nest of un-American, radical haters he is installing in Washington, each of us suddenly has a job to do, a chance to matter, to be a soldier in the army of American decency. Sure, our country suddenly is frightening as hell, but that means each one of us will have plenty of opportunities to oppose the mean, counter-productive measures Trump's henchmen will put in place, whether unleashing religious bigots to oppress gay people, dialing back women's reproductive rights, or forcing Muslims onto some fascist-tinged "registry." Every time you go to the Target could be a test. We will be called upon to push back against the haters who, liberated by Trump's example, will now feel free to oppress others.
    Not that it will be easy, or at least not always easy. The third time I was noting on Facebook that of course all decent folks, especially Jews, will sign up for any Muslim registry, a sort of "I'm Spartacus!" standing with our singled out brethren, I paused, and asked myself, "So ... what if this new registry carries a penalty for false reporting? Say up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for representing yourself as a Muslim if you're not? Do you still sign up? Just how committed are you to this whole freedom thing?"
   A tougher question. Online bravado is easy— a good thing, in one sense, since that cuts both ways, and just as on-line support is easy, so is on-line hate, and that means the vast majority of the sewer-dwelling white nationalists on Twitter probably would not actually, oh, set fire to a black church in the real world. The way they used to. At least one hopes they wouldn't, though a string of atrocities is to be expected — acts of terror committed in the name of opposing terrorism. I certainly expect them.
     But don't be deceived. When the rubber hits the road this spring, standing up for American values will have consequences, more than just nudging yourself into the comforting crowd at a rally or tweeting a particularly cutting remark. There will come a point when you will have to put your neck on the line. What will you do then?
    That may be an opportunity that you have dreamed about. Had I lived back then, what would I have done? When the world is falling apart — and if our world won't fall apart, count on it to split a bit at the seams — what would I have done? 
    No reason to answer that now. We all imagine we'd be heroes. Sure, we'd see the child slip into the water, kick off our shoes and swan dive into the river to save her without a moment's hesitation. That's what we tell ourselves anyway. Even if, had the moment ever really came, we might have just stood there gawping, pointing one trembling finger, frozen.
     The moment is going to come. Count on it. As Donald Trump and all he represents sour the American dream, as the highest offices, then lower offices, are filled with hard-eyed bigots, they will begin to build their vision for this country. Some Americans will eagerly join in. People who will no doubt shock you, by their presence, grinning on the podium next to The Donald. People you know, joining in the general hilarity of running some loathed group down. No one dreams of being a quisling, but they will leap at the chance. If the government started to recruit members for the New Waffen SS tomorrow, the line to join would be a mile long. And some would oppose it so long as doing so was convenient and risk free. But as soon as that opposition has consequences, risks, danger, many, maybe most, will fold, and go grumbling back to the sidelines to watch the tragedy unfold.
     “If it weren’t for fear,” Hemingway wrote. “Every bootblack in Spain would be a bullfighter.”
     Not everyone will cave, of course. Some will stand their ground. How many do that — dig in, stand up for their beliefs, hold firm, even when it isn't easy, even when they are imperiling themselves — that will decide how this thing ends up, just how much of a tragedy our nation is in for. You always wondered what you'd do in a crisis. Soon you'll get to find out.

Women for Trump

   A lot of email from yesterday's column about a woman who says she's fleeing to Canada out of fear of  a new holocaust. Perhaps surprisingly, the most passionate came from women. My guess is, since Trump is so blatant and grotesque in his disregard for women, they have to be especially fervent in their love for him to avoid any risks of recognizing the dissonance between their actual interests and what they're supporting. A number of sneering emails from women Friday; this will stand in for them all.

Your article comparing the Trump presidency to the actions of the third reich is hateful garbage. To base an entire article about some bigoted nitwit leaving for Canada is insulting. Hatred is consuming you, please leave.

     The charge that one is acting out of a hate is an example of the fallacy of assuming everyone is motivated by the same thing driving you. Particularly when you can't understand the argument they're trying to make. She's also aping Trump's habit of merely echoing back whatever charge is being made against him. "I'm a racist and misogynist? Noooo. Hillary Clinton, SHE'S the racist and misogynist." This week I stopped answering negative emails, generally — it took 30 years, but it finally happened. But this one the temptation was too great. I replied:

What's the hateful part? I just see a rightly frightened woman -- millions of them actually -- terrified by the real actions, this week, of the utterly unfit president-elect you've chosen. You're just doing the I'm-rubber-you're-glue parroting that your leader does so well. Proud of yourself? Really? The sad thing is, I bet you are. Thanks for writing. I'm staying right here. To thwart people like him. And you.

    Though I immediately regretted sending it — a big drawback of email. That last sentence, I would insert "try" — "To try to thwart people like him." Because who can be confident of stopping this juggernaut of hate that's assembling in New York City? I'm not. The time to stop them was Nov. 8, and we blew it. Now, all we can do is try, and grieve over the consequences of our failure.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     The photos I think are difficult to the point of being impossible to solve are usually the ones that are guessed right away.
     But this picture, while genuinely hard—it's just a house—will yield fruit to those who think a little about it. Solving the puzzle almost demands cogitation – assuming someone isn't familiar with the place and IDs it just based on personal experience.  With so many readers—and the numbers keep going up, which I appreciate—sometimes someone gets lucky.
      I renewed the contest because I found a cache of these desktop flags, copies of Commander Oliver Hazard Perry's battle flag. I want to give them away, to provide inspiration and encouragement. In these challenging days, as Donald Trump assembles his rogues' gallery of nitwits and haters to run our government into the ground and afflict vulnerable American citizens with fear, we need to remain calm, strong and stoical. Do not give up, the ship or anything else. Our country has survived many hardships, the worst always self-inflicted. Remember: the Red Scare. Vietnam. The battle for Civil Rights. Watergate. The path is seldom smooth. While Donald Trump represents an unprecedented departure from anyone we have had before in the Oval Office, despair is premature. We will survive him too, though we might have years of calamity, suffering, failure and shame ahead of us. The bad guys won an election, but that's all they won. A free people remain free, and as Barack Obama's eight years remind us, the president can only do so much, good or harm. 
    Enough. So where is this lovely house? Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

"History warns us ... the best thing to do is leave"

Canada

     Your neighbors will gladly murder you, given the nod by authority, then blame you for bringing your own death upon yourself. They’ll then move into your empty house, live there guilt-free, and years later, should anybody be so impolite as to raise the subject of your death, deny it ever occurred.

     That, in brief, is the lesson of the Holocaust, and if you suspect it left a scar on world Jewry, you’re right. Nothing like seeing the culture that produced Goethe, Rilke and Beethoven herding children into gas chambers to make you realize that the solid bedrock of civilized life, well, ain’t so solid.
      The earthquake of Donald Trump's election began with his calling Mexican immigrants rapists, then radiated outward, as hatred will, jarring Muslims and blacks, rattling women, before deputizing Mike Pence to go after gays. Hate doesn’t discriminate — talk about irony — it settles for whoever is convenient.

     Jews not fixated on Israel were shaken by formerly fringe anti-Semitic organizations riding into the mainstream on the Trump bandwagon, their slurs retweeted, their coded rhetoric about shadowy global conspiracy pockmarking his speeches.
    It worked. He won. Since Trump’s seismic election, rather than distance himself from the focused cruelty he exploited, as many wanly hoped he might, Trump has kept going, naming alt-right Breitbart bigot Stephen Bannon as his special adviser one day, recommitting himself to forcing Muslims in America to register the next.

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