"I didn't want to seem fantastic"

     Even though I've met Saul Bellow—been to his house, in fact when he lived in Hyde Park in the late 1980s—I'd never read anything he'd written, beyond mastering the parts of Herzog that take place at the Division Street Russian Baths, for purposes of my Chicago book. He seemed ... I don't know ... very 1970s, a Jewish John Updike.
     I did read James Atlas' biography, which confirmed my disinclination toward Bellow, as a self-obsessed cocksman who was lousy to his friend, Sydney J. Harris. The take away from the book was, a year after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bellow was despondent because he couldn't win it again. Why bother with a guy like that? 
     But my older boy Ross read The Adventures of Augie March and decided that my not having done so was a reason to tweak me. For years. Eventually I cracked, and a few weeks ago opened the book. 
     It's interesting. Not in a plot sense—not a lot happens in the nearly 600 pages that follow its famous opening line. "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city..." a line that Ross liked to quote, I now suspect, because it was true for him but not for me. The Chicago part. I am also an American, but Cleveland-born, which just doesn't sound the same.
     Augie is a feckless lad, attractive to women, and drifts from one relationship to another, in the 1930s and 1940s. Bellow was proud he didn't write a word of it in Chicago, but in various foreign enclaves, and it shows, an odd, internationalism, which grates with the image of city life through the kitchen transom in the book. 
    It did have a certain density, a lived physicality, that made me understand why people prize it so. 
    What struck me most was the book as an artifact of its time, as something published in 1953. There is a hideous abortion odyssey of humiliation for the most interesting female character, Mimi, that I'll have to save as illegal abortions come closer to reality across this country.
    And one exchange in the oddest part of the book -- a protracted journey with Thea, a rich gal who fell hopelessly in love with Augie because, well, that's what people do. They go off to Mexico to ... wait for it ... train eagles to hunt iguanas. It's an endless digression, one where, despite a cameo by Trotsky, I found interest in an unexpected place. Notice the word being bandied about in this passage, during one of the couple's wincingly-realistic fights:

     "We're not talking about the same thing. Not the love. It's the other thing you're so fantastic about."
    "Me—so fantastic?" she said with dry mouth and laid her hand over her breast."
     "Well, how can you think you're not—the eagle, the other things, the snakes, hunting every day?"
    It gave her another hurt.
    "What, were you just being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?"

     For as long as I remember, "fantastic" is a slightly more stilted form of "wonderful" or, to quote the online dictionary, "extraordinarily good or attractive." A synonym for "great." 
      But here it is obviously something negative. After batting about another word with a much more commonly-known shift in meaning -- "queer"— as in "Loving you, that wasn't at all queer to me. But now you start to seem queer." she ends with. "Why didn't you say how you felt? You could have told me. I didn't want to seem fantastic to you."
    It seemed so odd to see "fantastic" as a bad thing.
    "Fantast" or "phantast" is from the Greek, φαντα, "an ostentatious person, a boaster," someone concocting lies. Samuel Johnson starts the definition of "fantastick" in his great 1755 dictionary with "1. Irrational, bred only in the imagination" and touches upon unreality, unsteadiness and "having the nature of phantoms."
     Two hundred years later, in my 1978 Oxford English Dictionary, "fantastic" has hardly changed. The first definition is "existing only in imagination, proceeding merely from imagination, fabulous, imaginary, unreal" much closer to how we think of "fantasy" 
    My 1942 Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms, a useful resource parsing shades of meaning, places "fantastic" squarely in Bellow's world: "extravagantly fanciful or queer and hence incapable of belief, or, sometimes, approval." 
      "Fantastic" can be seen as taking a similar journey to "terrific" which, if you remember your zeppelin history, meant, according to the same Webster's, "by its size, appearance, potency, or the like, fitted or intended to inspire terror." which is the meaning WLS' Herb Morrison intended when he described the exploding Hindenberg as "a terrific thing, ladies and gentlemen." 
     And at that we had better wind it up, lest this turn into an awful post, which at one point would have meant it was "full of awe," and now would just mean "it's bad."

"People believe what they want to believe"

   
     Every day beautiful women reach out to me. On Facebook, wanting to be friends. I ignore them because I know they are really just overseas scam artists using swiped photos as bait, trolling for lonely men so out of touch that they don't pause to ask themselves why a 24-year-old fashion model noticed them in the wide sweep of the internet..
     But countless men aren't savvy enough to ask that question, and so spend untold millions supporting fiancees who don't exist, or paying blackmail after sexting their supposed online gal pals. The internet is a masked ball for fraudsters.
     Not that we needed the internet. Those with long memories might recall "The Land of Chonda-Za," where semi-nude "angels" frolicked and men would "have all their wishes and dreams fulfilled." Provided they paid a membership fee and worked their way up the ranks of worth by paying even more. A mid-1980s scam concocted by one Donald S. Lowry of Bettendorf, Iowa. The garden of delights was located north of the Quad Cities, of all places. There being no internet yet, Lowry sent out mass mailings.
     Who would fall for such a thing? Some 31,000 men across North America, according to federal prosecutors, bilked of $4.5 million. But that isn't the astounding part. The astounding part is, even after the scam was revealed, men clung to it. A dozen came from as far away as California to testify in Lowry's defense at his trial in Peoria in 1988. They carried photos of their angels in their wallets, where their money once had been.

To continue reading, click here. 

Black History Month: John DePriest

     Given that our new president is virtually blind to the reality of black life right now in America—lumping it all together in one undifferentiated urban hell--it should not be surprising that his grasp on black history is nearly nonexistent.  

     "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more," he said at a commemorative breakfast Wednesday.

     Well, maybe a little surprising, in that he seemed to think Douglass, the most famous African-American in the 19th century, was either still alive, or obscure enough that his fame is still just getting out there, thanks to a boost from The Donald.

    This isn't to blame Trump too much. He name-checked the handful of historical figures--Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks--who get the same dutiful nod every Black History Month. 

    Which is why I alway try to broaden the scope to include people who are important but utterly forgotten. This is a column I wrote almost 15 years ago, after John DePriest's daughter asked if I could pull the newspaper's clip file on her father. I did, and wrote about the injustices he faced, the kind of injustice African-Americans faced routinely then and now.

 
     It was a hot, humid night, the last day in July, shortly before 9 p.m. John DePriest Jr., a CTA bus driver, was finishing his shift on the Windsor line.
 

John DePriest Jr. 

   DePriest had been a bus driver for about two years. A graduate of West Virginia State, he had a teaching position lined up and was driving a bus to earn money until then.
     He never made it.
     DePriest pulled his bus into a weedy lot at 79th and Coles. There were 11 white teenagers waiting for him. One had a gun.
     The year was 1959.
     DePriest had met two of the teenagers earlier that day. William Weber Jr. and Jerry Leenheer had been waiting for a bus with a couple of girls after swimming at Rainbow Beach.
     The bus stopped, but not right where they were standing. Words were exchanged. Weber, according to later testimony, shouted, "Stop, you black thing."
     DePriest, a decorated Marine vet who had been wounded at Saipan, fighting with the all-black 52nd Marines, did not take the slur calmly. He cussed out Weber, telling him to come back after he finished his shift and they would "settle" the matter.
     Weber went home, ate a slice of cake, drank a glass of milk, took a single-shot derringer he owned and went to meet DePriest.
     On the way, he enlisted the help of 10 other boys, ages 16 to 19. Some were friends, others just street toughs caught up in the promise of a rumble.
     The teens went up to another driver and, using a racial slur to refer to DePriest, asked when DePriest would get there.
     DePriest's wife, Dannette, was on the bus. He had told her of the trouble, earlier in the day, and she was riding along with him. She saw her husband confront the boys. She saw him turn, and begin to walk away. She saw Weber pull the gun.
     "John, look out!" she cried.
     DePriest turned, and as he did, Weber fired. The bullet pierced his heart. Weber, a student at Mount Carmel High School, fled.
     Later, Weber would say: "The gun just went off."
     One hundred CTA bus drivers formed an honor guard at DePriest's funeral.
     Weber was charged with murder. Leenheer and nine others were charged as accessories.
     From the start, the emotionally charged case was followed closely by many Chicagoans as emblematic of the city's persistent racial strife. The driver's father, John DePriest Sr., and the defendant's father, William Weber Sr., nearly came to blows in a hall at the city morgue during the coroner's inquest.
     "My son has never been in trouble before," Weber was telling reporters in the hallway. "He's clean of mind and body." At that point DePriest, overhearing Weber, shouted, "Dirty filthy scum!" and lunged at him, only to be restrained by relatives.
     All the boys refused to testify at the inquest.
     That November, at Weber's trial, the defense argued that DePriest had antagonized Weber by not stopping his bus promptly.
     "What is more provoking than to stand on a corner and have a bus pass you by?" asked defense lawyer John Coghlan Sr., who claimed that the prosecution was currying favor with "racial groups" and that the boy had fired by accident after DePriest menaced him. "Is the idea of defending yourself against their aggression prejudice?"
     As Coghlan was summing up, pleading with the jurors to return Weber "to his fine father and mother," Dannette DePriest screamed out, "What about my fine husband?"
     Assistant State's Attorney Lawrence Genesen said, "When teenaged wolf packs go out and hunt people because of racial prejudice, it is time we teach them they are responsible for their acts. We are asking that you sentence this defendant to the penitentiary for life."
     The first trial -- in November 1959 -- ended in a hung jury. Judge Daniel Covelli proclaimed a mistrial after just five hours of deliberation, causing First Assistant State's Attorney Frank Ferlic to publicly blast the judge.
     "The judge certainly didn't give the jury enough time," he said. "The jurors stood 8 to 3 for conviction. That wasn't close enough to call a mistrial."
     Covelli called Ferlic "a frustrated old lady" and offered to resign from the bench if his ruling was found flawed.
     A second trial was held the next month. This jury had no problem reaching a guilty verdict, and Weber was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was led away from the courtroom in handcuffs, sobbing.
     Leenheer and another teen, who claimed that they had run when Weber pulled the pistol, were cleared by a jury in May 1960. And a few weeks later, the eight other accused teens were set free.
     DePriest left behind an 8-year-old daughter, Jolyn, who is now 50. She has strong memories of her father.
     "He was a very handsome man, a very determined man," said the woman, who recently wrote the Sun-Times a letter asking for any information about the murder. "He had a lot of pride. He wasn't one to be pushed around. He was a strong family man."
     The murder left "a void in her life," she said, not only for her, but for her son.
     "It's important for African-American males to have strong role models in life," she said. "My son was deprived of that. He never had a chance to interact (with his grandfather). All he knows is what he's read."
                 —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 29, 2001

Trigger law "a nightmare scenario for women"

     There’s no need to worry now that Donald Trump has nominated conservative Colorado judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, with an eye on overturning Roe v. Wade, and could name additional conservative justices in the future. You live here in the good old blue state of Illinois. Hillary Clinton country. Your ability to control your own body won’t be threatened, not like that of all those poor women in Texas and Indiana and other backwaters.
     Right?
     Wrong.
     Ladies, meet 720 Illinois Criminal Statute 510, as described in the Abortion Law of 1975. The bill grudgingly admits that abortion is legal, for the moment, but restates Illinois' belief that a fetus is a full human being from the moment of conception, and declares:

". . . if those decisions of the United States Supreme Court are ever reversed or modified or the United States Constitution is amended to allow protection of the unborn then the former policy of this State to prohibit abortions unless necessary for the preservation of the mother's life shall be reinstated."

     In layman's terms: the moment Roe is overturned, abortions are banned in Illinois unless the mother's life is at risk, one of four states to share what legislators call a "trigger law." The other states are Kentucky, Louisiana and South Dakota.
     If you've never heard of it, join the club.
     "Very few people know," said state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago. "The reaction is the kind of shock and disbelief you might imagine. It is the virtual smack up side the head."
     “If the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe, immediately in the state of Illinois all abortions become illegal and criminalized,” said state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, who has introduced House Bill 40 into the General Assembly to void the trigger law. “To get ahead of what might be a nightmare scenario for women in this state, we should strike those words. We need to be ready in case the worst happens, the unthinkable.”
     The bill also removes provisions in Illinois law that deny insurance coverage for an abortion to women who depend on Medicaid and State Employee Health Insurance. Fifteen other states already provide such funding.
     Why wasn’t this done years ago?
     “People never took it seriously when we would raise it in the past,” said Lorie Chaiten, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project at the ACLU of Illinois. “But people are taking it seriously now.”
     “I think if we had tried to do it in the past, even the recent past, we would be a laughingstock because [overturning Roe] was never going to happen,” said Kelly. “We would have had same reaction: ‘Why are you fixing something that’s not broken?’ We knew it wasn’t fine, and we’re here now. Now it is an emergency. ”
     The good news is that the current justice only replaces Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. His replacement will return the court to the balance it already had. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83; Anthony Kennedy is 80. What if Trump should last four or eight years?
     “We’re very concerned,” said Brigid Leahy, director of public policy at Planned Parenthood of Illinois. “If Trump has the ability to appoint another justice, we do not want to wait to see what happens. We want to make sure abortion stays safe and legal in Illinois.”
     What are the bill’s chances?
     “We’re hoping,” said Feigenholtz. “We’re going to call this bill in committee as soon as they convene, in early February.”
     “I really hope that some of the more moderate folks who have said over the years, ‘I can’t be with you on this, I would never let it become illegal,’ meant it, because I’m coming back to them now and I expect their vote,” said Kelly.
     This affects women, not only in Illinois, but surrounding states.
     “Illinois is a safe haven for women,” said Leahy. “We have already seen over the last 10 years, a very concerted nationwide effort to pass state level restrictions that make it so difficult for women to obtain abortions. They’re already leaving their home states, coming here to Illinois. Planned Parenthood sees women from surrounding states. Iowa and Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky. It ends up being easier for them to travel to Springfield.”
     And should readers be moved to try to act on this, what should they do?
     “Call their state representatives,” Feigenholtz said. “Make sure their legislators are supporting HB 40. This is going to be the most important piece of women’s legislation in this general assembly.”
     “We are working all day and all night to pass this bill so that women in this state can have access to save and legal abortions,” she continued. “We are not going backwards. We are not. We just can’t. We’re going to fight to the end on this.”
     Here we disagree. We obviously are going backwards. We just elected President Backwards, who is going to sign pieces of paper until the country marches back with him into their imagined past. The question now is: how far?

Why these orders?

     Let's step back and take in the big picture for a moment.
    On Friday, Donald Trump signed his nonsensical Muslim ban, barring all refugees from Syrian and travelers from seven Muslim nations, none of which was involved in the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing or, indeed, any terror attack on American soil. 
    On Tuesday he'll name a Supreme Court nominee whose central purpose is to overturn Roe v. Wade. And very soon, maybe also Tuesday, he will sign an executive order permitting bigots to point to their supposed religious values when shunning and abusing gay people, plus permitting adopting agencies to deny gay couples the chance to have a family based on their own baseless prejudices, cloaked in a fig leaf of supposed faith.
    Why these three groups, these three issues? Because empty security theater, abortions, and being forced to bake wedding cakes for gay people are the three most pressing problems facing our nation?
    No.
    There is a commonality to all three. Trump is doing these because he can. If he, oh, allowed Jews to be banned from hotels, as was the practice in the 1950s, or blacks from public swimming pools, as was done in the 1960s, the outrage would even be greater than we're already seeing displayed by decent, patriotic Americans over the Muslim ban, Trump's disregard for women and—projecting into the future—his anti-gay orders.
     And in a sense, he has to. He ran on a platform appealing to the fears and bigotries of his base, and now he has to deliver the goods. They expect it.
     Keep this in mind. Haters are cowards, and rarely say--anymore--"I don't want to see brown-skinned people." "I despise Jews" or "Black people frighten me." So they offer up reasons: safety. Religious freedom. The rights of the unborn imagined into "babies."
    And it works. We buy it. We fall to arguing their reasons, as if we didn't realize that these are just smokescreens. Security doesn't matter. Trump's anti-Muslim ban makes us less secure, not more. Babies don't matter -- they sure don't care about refugee babies. And religion doesn't matter. Christian faith could just as easily be cited as a reason to celebrate gay marriage as to ban it. They point to faith because we're accustomed to giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to faith. And we shouldn't, not when it's being used as a pretext to claim damage that is not in fact there.
     So don't get sucked in. Trump was swept to power by haters who do not make distinctions. What they do is attack who they can, when they can, how they can. Now it is Muslims, women and gays, because they are vulnerable. Next it could be you.

Where's the Queen of the Night when we need her?

Photo by Andrew Cioffi. 

     The arts are always there, waiting to shelter us. When the news from Washington gets too grim, too relentless, too crazy, there is comfort and sanity, order, beauty and justice in a book, in a play, in music.

     Not forever. You don't want to shut off reality completely. By keeping track we know when it's time to rush downtown and howl down our captors.
     But nobody can be aghast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That'll kill you as sure as jack-booted thugs will.
     So it was with gratitude that last Wednesday morning I popped into the Civic Opera House to peek at the Lyric Opera of Chicago's rehearsals of "Carmen"—I'm taking 100 readers to that classic Bizet opera next month, and will have a column about the opera, the rehearsal and the contest ... as soon as the marketing department gives me the green light. But just hearing the music, seeing the dancers, even in a rough rehearsal space. Suddenly a certain demagogue was Jupiter: a giant gasbag rendered into a dull spot lost amidst the much brighter stars. 

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

     And they pay me for this....
     That afternoon, I blew off all responsibilities and caught the last matinee of "The Magic Flute." A new production, transferring Mozart's 1791 tale of love, bird-catching, and Masonic hoo-hah to the post-war suburbs—it's basically become an entertainment staged on the patio of a revolving suburban Cape Cod home. The three Genii, usually falsetto boys in white wigs on a magic ship, now have cowboy hats and sheriff badges.
     I don't always like the staging decisions at the Lyric, but this one, for me, worked, the Levitown aspect underscoring the inherent weirdness of the opera. Or maybe I just really, really needed it to work. No need to bother with the plot—I'm not sure why anyone ever mention the plots of operas. They're all the same: the couple meets, falls immediately in love, gets separated, reunites, to live happily ("Magic Flute" et al) or die protractedly ("Aida," "Tristan und Isolde").
     Though the news has a way of intruding. "Flute" begins with our hero, Tamino, being chased by a dragon (a rather Chinese-New-Yearish dragon, this being an entertainment at a suburban home). The dragon is slain by an arrow shot by the Queen of the Night's three Ladies, though the heroic deed is claimed by their feckless bird catcher, Papageno.
     For this, the Ladies clap a padlock on his lips (causing him, delightfully, to have to hum one of Mozart's songs). But you can't go through a whole opera like that, and the Queen shows pity, removing the lock so he can chatter, though not before the Ladies extract a vow.
     "So you will never tell a lie, or brag about a deed done by another?" they sing. Papageno agrees, and they all rejoice.

If only every liar had

a lock like this upon his mouth

then would hate, calumny and rancor

be replaced by love and brotherhood!

      Sing it, sisters! 

      No need to point it out, right? I didn't think so. We're all there. The three Ladies in the "Magic Flute" picked up on a Papageno's single lie right away, and he was punished for it.
     Shame that doesn't happen enough in real life—that's why we need fiction. In real life, if you get away with it, maybe because you're really rich and surrounded by fawning sycophants, then lying becomes a pattern, and you lie more and more, and can't acknowledge it and can't stop. That's what makes it pathological.
     The only question I have is this: if you are a liar lying about everything in order to prop your ego up and pretend like your disasters are successes, can the people who have thrown in their lot with you really not notice? The cowardice of Papageno is funny because,well, it's an opera. In real life it's shameful.

     I don't want you to think that I spent the three hour opera brooding on politics. And lying is not really intrinsic to Mozart's comic opera. Though it sure is to ours, at the moment, though whether this tale ends up a comedy or a tragedy, well, we're still working that out.

Fear and loathing in the cat food aisle

Photo by Sebastian Farmborough

    The haters won. In the recent presidential election at least. Our country was invaded from within and now we have to watch, powerless, as they give their fears and biases the strength of law in our once-great nation.
    The only defense — at the moment — is to object, to loudly state the truth, declare the wrongness of this, and reaffirm our abused American values. President Donald Trump signed a brazenly-bigoted executive order Friday barring all refugees from the United States for four months, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely, and barring immigrants from seven Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
    Chaos ensued worldwide. And while, yes, protesters gathered spontaneously at airports and pushed back and a federal judge stayed the order, whether over the long term the courts will be respected any more than the media or any other pillar of American democracy that Trump is kicking at is doubtful.

    The pretext was to avoid terror. But this comes from the dynamic of welding terrorist acts committed by Muslims to their faith, while writing off non-Islamic acts of terror as being due to something else. This bias was shown when Trump said he would encourage the entry of Christians, who are also persecuted abroad, though nowhere near the numbers or severity of people in countries like Syria.
     This shameful prejudice will cost the lives of people who could have become upstanding American citizens, draw justifiable scorn upon our country, and make the United States less, not  more, secure. The only comfort—cold comfort—is the knowledge we are not alone in this prejudice, nor is it anything new, as this column from 2009 reminds us. I think this explains why Donald Trump was elected as much as anything can. It was written back when the column contained subheadings, and I've left those in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Two weeks ago, the people of Switzerland voted to ban new construction of minarets, the towers associated with mosques.
     Which raises the obvious question: How many minarets are already in Switzerland? There must be a whole lot, to provoke this extraordinary ban.
     How many? Guess. Ten? Fifty? A hundred?
     Four. There are exactly four minarets in Switzerland. And now that's all there will ever be.
     Italy is considering a similar ban — odd, since, traditionally, Germany usually took the lead in this sort of thing. You'd think, in Europe, they'd be a little reluctant to go down the step-on-the-scary-minority route. They've been there before.

Don't block the coconut shrimp!

     The Swiss ban is based on fear, which, sadly, the Swiss do not have a monopoly on, as this e-mail illustrates:
         
           Neil,

    I was in Costco in Niles yesterday around 5 p.m. The store was packed. I was going in to buy cat food. The pet food section is on the far wall, at the corner. As I approached the cat food, I saw three women in full on burkas. Completely cloaked except for their eyes.
     They were kneeling and praying to Mecca. In a COSTCO. In the USA. I gotta tell you, I was totally freaked out and totally enraged. At that moment I wanted to attack them, physically. Really. I couldn't believe it, and I thought it was totally wrong. If you have to pray to Mecca, don't go to Costco. I got my cat food, and walked past them and I just said, loudly, "This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA."
     What could I have done? I wanted to complain to the management, but by the time I got through the line to pay I just wanted to get the hell out of the store. That experience totally made me sympathize with the woman who pulled the headscarf off the Muslim woman on the South Side. I am not a religious person at all, but I was enraged. What is going on? What do you think about that? . . . I had a cell phone with a camera, and I wanted to film them but I couldn't do it.
Thanks!

     Here she gives her full name and place of employment -- which I, a kind soul, will withhold.
     I wrote her back:

     While I appreciate your candor, you should realize that this is one of those times when a complaint says a lot more about the complainer than it does the thing being complained about. A few questions—What is it about a Costco that makes it less appropriate a location than anyplace else for those women to pray? Had they been a trio of elderly women doing the rosary at the coffee shop in a Borders bookstore, would you also have been "enraged"? If the answer is no, then it isn't an issue of people praying in commercial public spaces, but how they pray and what kind of space they pray in. Is Costco somehow especially sacred to you? I mean, I know they hand out that coconut shrimp, but still . . .
     And what does "This is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" mean to you? I thought it meant that this is exactly the sort of place where a woman, however she dresses, could feel safe from being attacked by strangers enraged by her attire, as opposed to, say, Saudi Arabia, where she might be attacked for wearing a short dress. Is the Saudi way actually the American way?
     Frankly, if you're sending this to me, then you haven't quite grasped what I've been writing, lo these many years. As the saying goes: Hating other people is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. Had you viewed this calmly, an argument could be made that if we allow religions to start using our discount stores as places of worship, then the aisles will be clogged and we won't be able to get to our cat food.
     That is reasonable, and I would agree. But it is also a long way from rage. Would you feel the same if a group of Christmas carolers were blocking your way to the cat food? If Islam is so offensive, then why were you the one who was "enraged" in Niles, while the Muslim women were the ones praying to God?
     My older son's junior high school math teacher wears a full burka with a face veil, something I was surprised to discover at parent-teacher conferences. When I later asked my son why he hadn't mentioned that before—it seemed interesting, the sort of thing one might toss out in casual conversation—he said, and I quote: "You know, Dad, you taught us that kind of thing doesn't matter." I'm proud of that. Turns out she's a good, enthusiastic math teacher, a fact that would have been lost to me had I worked myself into a knot over her outfit. As it was, it took me maybe 30 seconds to get used to talking with a woman wearing a veil, a path I heartily recommend.
     It's still a person under there.
     Thanks for writing. I don't usually argue with readers, one-on-one, at least not at such length. But yours is, alas, a common attitude that most people don't have the lack of inhibition to actually come out and say, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to set you straight.

Best,

Neil Steinberg

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 13, 2009