Hope flickers, and is extinguished.

Laocoon and his sons, Vatican Museum

     I wrote this in the hours waiting for Trump to pull out of the Paris accord Thursday. Maybe because there was a delay — the announcement had been expected Wednesday — it became sufficed with a baseless hope. But I was glad I had it ready, as the event itself was just too damn depressing, more than I expected. People I knew were genuinely shocked, which is surprising at this point of the Trump administration. Maybe not "shocked." Sad and disappointed, worried and embarrassed. I was happy to walk out of the newsroom and go downstairs and watch the river,  a perfect first day in June, and remember that the world goes on, more or less, despite the folly of the humans upon it.


     I confess.
     As 2 p.m. CST Thursday approached, the hour set for an expected Rose Garden announcement that the United States is turning its back on both the unified nations of the world and on the planet itself, pulling out from the Paris climate accord, a spark of hope flickered.
     Could he...? Could he possibly...?
     See, one good thing about Donald Trump — I almost said "the redeeming quality" but let's not get carried away. But one positive attribute, as I've mentioned before, is that he doesn't believe in anything. Nothing at all except of course himself. No causes, no ironclad convictions, other than utter certainty that he is the very center of the twirling universe.
    And a strange, non-Euclidian space it truly is, folding in upon itself. Should Donald Trump be emboldened to venture any distance in one direction he winds up right back where he began: himself. All vectors lead to Donald.
     Trump never cared if we built a wall and Mexico paid for it. Not given the alacrity with which he dropped the notion once in office. Or for repealing NAFTA. His daft campaign promises mere empty words mouthed to draw the naive, vote-paying public into his gaudy tent.
     Hours before he abandoned our country's commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it was announced that, despite his vows to the contrary, the U.S. embassy will not move to Jerusalem.

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    Editor's note: Laocoon, according to myth, angered the gods by trying to warn of the danger of the Trojan horse, and was punished along with his twin sons. The image seemed a tacit nod to the dangers of prophecy, even when completely accurate. ESPECIALLY when completely accurate. 

The United States walks away from the Paris climate accords

     I am old enough to remember cars without seat belts. The restraints did not become mandatory in new cars until 1966, a little late for me — I had already lost my baby teeth against the dashboard of Phil Flannigan's mother's car after she stopped short for a light on Bagley Road in Berea, Ohio. 
     Even then, wearing seat belts was never mandatory in the good old U.S. of A., so only about 2/3 of Americans do, as compared to 95 percent of Germans. 
     An estimated 5,000 American lives could be saved if seatbelt rate were at 90 percent but, you know, freedom!
     The obvious solution to this destructive negligence was air bags, which do not require drivers to activate them any fashion. But airbags cost money, and automakers fought installing them for decades, only beginning to yield when they realized that a certain sort of driver would pay a premium for safety. Finally, airbags became mandatory in U.S. cars in 1998.
     I thought of this midweek, as the Trump administration began signaling that we will indeed join  Syria and Nicaragua in rejecting the Paris climate accord, walking away from the collective effort endorsed by 193 other nations
     To be honest, if the Republicans merely said the truth: they are in the pockets of big business which, like car makers in the 1970s, find it too expensive to guarantee the safety and comfort of their customers, I could almost respect that. People are greedy and lazy and think short term.
     But that requires a level of candor they are incapable of. So they attack the science, ginning up objections, pulling at any lose thread, any cool day, to mock and jeer the hard truth that emissions from fossil fuels are raising the temperature of the planet far faster than even our worst fears of several years ago.
     When the shoe finally drops — though some tiny part of me holds out hope that, at that last second, Trump will shrug off rejecting Paris, the way he abandoned his wall, gutting health care, his Muslim ban, and a variety of other missteps, none as significant as this one.  
     Maybe he's had enough flipping off the world for one week. This would come hard on the heels of his trip to Europe, when the president, like a 21st century Innocent Abroad, put a dent in the Atlantic alliance by hectoring our NATO allies for not paying enough, in his estimation, of the cost of defending Europe against his buddy, Vladimir Putin.
    Frankly, we can count on the Europeans to realize, along with half of America, that Trump is a kidney stone the nation will eventually expel, after much pain time wasted curled and ineffectual. And it would not be completely irrational to imagine that the U.S. dropping the ball on climate change will encourage other nations to pursue clean technologies with increased zeal, hoping to fill the leadership void we have left.
   Airbags save thousands of lives of a year. Though the number of traffic deaths in 2015 — 38,000 — was a significant jolt upward, prompted, it is thought, by people texting while driving, few bothered to point out that it was the same number of deaths as recorded in 1937, when the nation had half the population.  The grim math of truth sets in, and then business, which is supposed to be so clever, realizes that it is good economics to do the right thing. Global warming is real as a car wreck. Coal is on the way out. Nations that see this and plan for the future will thrive. And those that don't—the United States, Syria and Nicaragua—will suffer. Although, since we're already suffering, big time, I should say, "We're going to suffer more."

Godzilla never seems to mind that he's crushing Tokyo

 

     Seven hundred days? Where has the time gone?
     That's easy. Washed over the waterfall of wasted opportunity. With the entire state of Illinois soon to follow, battered on rocks, then breaking apart as it plunges into the frothing financial abyss.
     Unless . . . .
     Well, unless nothing. This isn't going to be fixed. Not now. Not next month. Maybe not next year. Maybe not ever. We're at the light incense and pray for Superman stage of the problem.
     It is disingenuous for the Sun-Times, my beloved mother ship, to post a daily front page count of how long it has been since Illinois has had a budget. The idea is that doing so will somehow shame our leaders into coming to an agreement and getting on with the business of trying to right the capsized and foundering vessel that is Illinois.
     But really, if embarrassment were a possibility with the speaker of the house and the governor, this would have resolved itself long ago. I've met crackheads living in a nest of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive who had a more highly developed sense of shame than these two jokers.
     I do not want to fall into the easy "a plague on both their houses" trap. Yes, they are equally unpleasant men.
     Bruce Rauner is a callous, sneering billionaire who comes across in person like the human model of C. Montgomery Burns on "The Simpsons." Rauner expressed no interest whatsoever in public life beyond enriching himself until, perhaps bored, he took some of his bottomless lake of money and began fire hosing it at Illinois—a kind of political waterboarding. Eventually the state, sputtering and gasping, cried uncle, and elected him governor over Pat Quinn. Good old Pat, standing at the mound in his zigzag T-shirt, lowered his head as if weighed down by the brim of his enormous baseball cap, uttered a sigh and padded home.
     And Mike Madigan is a grim slip of a man: think of a last year's jack-o'-lantern mounted on a broomstick, the whole thing marinated in vinegar then hung out to dry.
     Rauner is definitely in the wrong. He's kneecapped the budget, tying it to a variety of side issues—castrating the unions, demanding term limits so that no future Madigans can spawn. With typical my-way-or-the-highway Republican scorn, he demands capitulation then denounces his opponents for holding as fast to their convictions as he does to his own. Even as unions founder, corporate profits soar, and non-CEO salaries—surprise, surprise—stagnate, Rauner insists that the union bogeyman must be defeated before someone tosses a life ring to Illinois.
     If rich old white men like Madigan and Rauner were being hurt by this impasse, it would have been resolved yesterday. But it damages the poor, the struggling young—who rely on public universities and colleges that are dropping staff, injecting furlough days into their academic calendars, and, in general, suffering on starvation rations. Plus those with disabilities, victims of crime, and all the unfortunates who must fall back onto a safety net that both men are pawning to the rope merchant.
     Am I near the end? Good. Because this is pointless. Rauner doesn't need to compromise—his kids are fine. And Madigan can't without prying the fingers of what remains of the Illinois middle class off the bottom rung of the ladder. So as the days and years dribble away, our two leaders, like Godzilla and Rodan, grapple and roar and roll around, smashing the model Tokyo to flinders.
     Godzilla never seems to mind the buildings being crushed beneath him, does he? Mothra doesn't flinch before pulling down the sparking power lines. You never see the guys in the rubber suits pause, thinking, "Gosh, I hope those people on that bus are OK. . . ." They're monsters. They don't care. That's he definition of being a monster. Not caring.
     If either Madigan or Rauner care about the state being ground to kindling under them, there is scant evidence. The people of Illinois, we care big time. We can't afford not to. But nobody hears our voices over the din; they must be muffled by those thick rubber suits.

Impeach Trump?

     Impeach Trump? You're kidding, right? Impeach him for what? Pervasive toxic jerkishness is not, alas, a high crime and misdemeanor, the standard set out in the Constitution. 
    Or do you think he can be impeached because his campaign colluded with the Russia during the election? Is that even a crime?  
    If it is, don't you imagine that there are a plenty of cringing underlings for Trump to casually kick into the ditch? While the Donald smirks his personal responsibility away and fires off a few dead-of-night tweets glorying in it all? Nothing has stuck to him yet. Why would this?    
     Besides, who would do the impeaching?  Congress, right? The Republican Congress. The same trembling cowards who can't even utter a word criticizing the most unfit leader our nation has ever seen are somehow going to magically pivot and great rid of him? After they shelved all their supposed beliefs and principles to meekly shuffle wherever he decided to lurch today. It's like expecting a spinning weather vane to hop off the old barn and point your way through a forest.
    Won't happen. It surprises me to hear people speculating it could happen. Magical thinking, on par with believe-in-fairies-or-Tinkerbell-will-die. And it's such a pathetically easy solution. Deus ex machina; let's just wish this away. A denial of hard realities not dissimilar from the kind of head-in-the-sand outlook that got Trump elected in the first place.
     And like many fantasies, destructive in that it distracts us with daydreams from the hard work at hand. You don't need to harvest the crop if you are convinced gnomes will do it. And there is hard, right-now work beyond breathlessly awaiting what the Washington Post will dig up next.
     Whenever the subject comes up, I shock the people taking a big lungful of the pipe dream by saying, "Impeach him? It's far more likely we'll re-elect him." They stand there, exhaling, the blissed out grin dying on their faces.
    We should be talking about his reelection, not his impeachment. I can see reelection happening. Easily.  It's the far more likely outcome — if somebody wants to put down his money on impeachment, and I can put and equal sum down on re-election, winner-take-all, I'll grab at that bet.  But you'll lose.
     His base is standing with him, more or less. The Democrats have nobody. And it's happened before. The pattern is already there. History is not a schematic for the future, but there are hints and lessons there. Since those spinning impeachment dreams drum up Richard Nixon, who resigned after the gears of impeachment began to grind him. So let's go with Nixon. 
    In 1968, he defeated Hubert Humphrey, an unloved political hack not unlike Hillary Clinton.  While Nixon drifted to the center -- he created the EPA, went to China -- the Democrats tacked left, nominating George McGovern, who was so progressive he lost 49 states. 
     So sure, the impeachment process swung into action against Nixon. But he was also re-elected, after Watergate began to grab headlines. 
     The Bernie Sanders sideshow could convince the Democrats that a similarly radical candidate—though not Sanders himself, thank you God, for one because he'll be 79 in 2020—can have a chance in hell, which Sanders wouldn't have had once America took a good hard look at what was behind his slogans, which wasn't much. We're not a radical left nation. We can't even find our way to national health care, like every other nation on earth with indoor plumbing. 
    Don't get me wrong. Given the daily shocks that the Trump administration serve up when he isn't abroad, deeply humiliating the country, giving NATO a kick (I wish I could believe Putin pays him directly for this kind of thing; my gut tells me they just both think alike) and re-assuring the Europeans that their traditional tacit contempt for America is finally justified, no one can say when whatever smoking gun, tawdry tape, or grotesque cruelty or stupidity will finally pry his supporters' fingers off the door jamb. It's possible.
    But don't hold your breath. There's no reason to consider it now. We just elected the guy last November. And in once sense, we got exactly what we paid for. Nobody can say they were deceived by Trump—sure, he made all these mendacious promises that he didn't even pretend to try to keep. But it was clear he'd do that, particularly since half of what he promised was patently impossible. If voters could screw their eyes tight and vote for him in November, what makes you think they won't stay that way for the next eight years? Opening your eyes to Trump now would be like opening your eyes under the ocean. It burns. 
     The only focus should be: elect Democratic Congressmen in 2018. Then we can talk impeachment, provided we're still allowed to talk at all. Until then, find a decent presidential candidate for 2020 who won't be so flawed she lets a notorious liar, bully and fraud get his tiny hands on the levers of power.

Candid biography of cartoonist Mauldin shines light on worst of war

 

        No fallen soldier actually benefits from the empty platitudes that rise from a million Facebook pages on Memorial Day. The fulsome and generic praise that passes for "honor"—and I've been guilty of it myself in the past and no doubt will again in the future—seems more designed to make the speaker feel a warm bubble of self-satisfied civilian complacency than to reflect the actual miseries and horror of service; "sacrifice" is too glittery and false a word. 
      This column was actually a book review, but I think it touches upon the reality we are whitewashing today with our lip-service. It ran when the column took up a full page, and I've left in the sub-headlines and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     The youngest soldiers who served in the Second World War are in their late 70s now, and an estimated thousand American World War II vets die every day. They are sent off in a blast of "Greatest Generation" tribute, patriotism and nostalgia, which is only fitting, on a personal level, though it does get a bit cloying and of course is a gross simplification of what actually happened.
     Thus it is a refreshing tonic to read Todd DePastino's new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, which, like its subject, picks candor over mythologizing.    
     Mauldin was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, famous for creating the Willie and Joe characters in World War II -- unshaven, exhausted foot soldiers yearning, not for glory, but for dry socks and a hot shower. Mauldin was on the staff of this paper for 30 years, and died five years ago this month.
     While he is best-known for his World War II work -- and the grieving Lincoln statue he drew the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated -- Mauldin continued, for decades after V-J Day, to provide a refreshing counterpoint to the tendency of people -- particularly military men -- to rhapsodize their past heroics. During the Vietnam era, DePastino notes, Mauldin "reminded those who complained about draft evaders that during World War II, 'the draft board had to drag most of us, whimpering, out of the bushes.' "
     Some 400,000 American soldiers died in World War II, so of course their sacrifices -- and the sacrifices of those who survived -- should receive commemoration. So long as we also remember that the heroic tales we tell ourselves -- as usual -- are only the shiny surface of the story. There is more.

SOME SHOT THEM FOR SPORT

     

     During the last nine months of World War II, Todd DePastino tells us, more American soldiers fighting in Europe died of alcohol poisoning than of communicable disease. In Italy, 20,000 U.S. troops deserted their units -- one reason the military brass tolerated Bill Mauldin's syndicated blasphemy was because the truth was far worse, and they hoped that collapsing morale might be bolstered if the men could see a faint reflection of reality and laugh at it.
     Meanwhile, on the home front, a sizable chunk of the American public was eager to make peace with the Nazis and declare the whole thing a draw. Which is why the Allies had a ban on depicting dead soldiers, for the same reason George W. Bush tried to keep Americans from seeing flag-draped coffins, as an attempt to undercut demands for peace.
     "Such candor might increase sentiment for a negotiated peace with Germany, a position shared by nearly a third of Americans in mid-1942," DePastino writes.
     Since Mauldin specialized in presenting soldiers, not as the spit-and-polish warriors of home-front propaganda, but as mud-caked mopes seeing how flat they can press themselves to the ground, it's fitting that DePastino renders World War II, not as the heroic moment of moral clarity we prefer to remember, but as a terrifying ordeal where the good and bad guys could be hard to sort out. In this book, American soldiers rape and kill, driving around Morocco shooting Arabs for fun.
    "Some shot them for sport," DePastino writes, " 'like rabbits in the States during hunting season,' as one American explained in a letter home."
     Then there was Naples. DePastino calls the city under American military control "the largest black market in history" with stolen Allied supplies accounting for 65 percent of the city's per capita income.
     "Cargo pilferage in Naples attained levels unprecedented in the history of warfare," he writes. "Food, clothing, fuel, medicine, blankets, cigarettes, and vehicles disappeared in such large quantities that by December 1943, Allied infantry were receiving only two-thirds of the supplies earmarked for them."
     This was not brazenly done under American noses; rather, it was brazenly done with enthusiastic American help.
     Not to give the impression that the underside of the war is all that DePastino shows us. There are truly moving moments, such as Gen. Lucian Truscott's Memorial Day speech.
     "Before a crowd of Army luminaries and VIPs from the States, including several U.S. senators, General Truscott climbed onto the speaker's platform and turned his back on the audience; his address, he informed the crowd, was for those lying beneath the endless rows of graves in the sandy soil of the Anzio beachhead."
     And what did Truscott say?
     "He apologized to the men arrayed before him for sending them to their deaths. It was his fault, he said, and the fault of all those commanders who order men into battle. He had made mistakes, the general admitted, and those errors had cost lives."
     Truscott "promised that in the future if he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do."

 SPUNKY GUY WHO COULD DRAW

     A Life Up Front is the first biography of Mauldin. It won't be in stores for a few weeks. Sorry for jumping the gun, but it's such a wonderful book, and I can only begin to describe how it captures Mauldin's complex, tragic, funny, fascinating personality. Some events almost defy belief, except that you can't make such things up. Mauldin, on his own from an early age, returns home at 17 to show off his new ROTC uniform to his alcoholic father. "He arrived at the old homestead to find Pop drunk and naked, wallowing in a bathtub filled with homemade beer," DePastino writes. " 'There he was,' Bill recalled with laughter decades later, 'pissing in the beer and then scooping some out for a drink.' "

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Bill Mauldin could make the most mundane matter into a joke. On the physical exam that admitted his scrawny, 110-pound self into the Arizona National Guard five days before it was federalized into the U.S. Army, Mauldin said:
     "They didn't really test our eyes, they sort of counted them."
                   —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 2, 2008

Ramadan (whenever it began) is more than just fasting

     Crossing Devon Avenue, walking up to the Muslim Women Resource Center, my first thought was that the organization had somehow convinced the Grocery & Meat Market to let them camp out in a corner of their store, as the two entities share the same green sign.
     The truth is even more surprising.

    

        "The store is our social enterprise," said Sima Quraishi, executive director of the MWRC. "We've been running Muslim Women Resource Center for the past 15 years. Two years ago, when the governor cut down the budget, we decided that we should do something to make some money so we don't have to lose our staff. This is what we came up with. Giving back to the community. Our main goal is to sell to the community and also hire community members."  

       The market looks like your standard, small, ethnic city grocery. A haphazard assemblage of items from floppy bags of fresh naan to bottles of frozen camel's milk. A variety of chutney and some enigmatic items, such as bags labeled "Broken Sugar."
     I was visiting because Ramadan — the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and a time of spiritual renewal — was beginning sometime this weekend. (Don't ask exactly when because it's complicated "We don't know," said a staffer at the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, suggesting I survey a few mosques and gather their opinions.)

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The humdrum life is thrilling enough

 
     This past week was a particularly lethal one on Mount Everest: four climbers killed. Which made me think of this column, written—ack!—over 20 years ago. It has the shades of immaturity upon it. I don't think I would quite so casually mock a father-to-be who had just died in a mountaineering accident. Though I am proud of making the connection between mountain climbing and drug use. And remember, at the time I wrote this, I had been on paternity leave, helping tend a newborn for seven months. So I had something of the mania of a glittering fanatic myself, deep in his own struggle up the mountainside. 

     The weather was calm, the air, still. It was just after lunch when I set up my base camp, on the southern ridge of the green sofa. The view, of the rocking chair and the expanse of the dining room beyond, was fabulous.
     If conditions held, my goal was in sight. I was almost there, drifting off to a pleasant slumber, when my wife clattered into the room, performing some sort of chore. My eyes snapped open. The elusive quarry would have to wait for another day.
     Napping doesn't enjoy the good publicity that mountaineering does. I have no idea why. Naps are far more pleasant and attainable. Plus the odds of perishing in a freak storm, the way eight climbers on Mount Everest did recently, are almost nil.
     Perhaps if naps had better hype—a few hyperkinetic TV commercials showing paunchy guys wearing their Snooze Nikes as they sprawl on comfortable couches, a few blowzy memoirs with titles like My Naps on Seven Continents—then some of those climbers would have stayed home, and been alive today.
    As reluctant as I am to detract from the grand, operatic techno-tragedy of dying climbers cell-phoning in their last words to their soon-to-be widowed spouses and half-orphaned children, somebody should point out, if only in a hushed whisper, that these people are idiots, throwing their lives away in pursuit of a transcendent thrill.
     That sounds harsh. Outdoorsy types—clerks at mountaineering shops, board of trade members who've taken a few adventure vacations—will disagree, of course. They'll evoke all sorts of piffle about sportsmanship and Just-Do-It-itivity, and facing the ultimate challenge. The same fairy tale we've been telling ourselves for a century.
     In the beginning, there was the excuse of exploration and science. Now the climb is just a meaningless, cargo-cult imitation of those early expeditions, done for self-glorification. People climb Everest to prove something to themselves, as a personal accomplishment, as an adventure.
     Fine, so far. But isn't that little selfish? What about their families? What about their kids? That view from the top of Everest must be really something, to be willing to risk it being the last thing you ever see. That climber with the wife who is seven months pregnant—if he wanted a thrill, he could have gotten one by just hanging around the house for another two months. Perhaps even a bigger thrill than climbing Everest—he'll never know now, will he? The tragedy isn't that he was killed; that was just bad luck. The tragedy is that he went.
     Seeking thrills, in general, is overemphasized. Perhaps I'm just a cautious type, but I find life plenty thrilling, right here at home. Sometimes just merging onto Lake Shore Drive at Fullerton is enough wild adventure to last me a week.
     If there was a difference between the climbers who died from bad weather on Everest and the junkies who died that week from bad heroin in Baltimore, I would suggest it is a minor one, a fine shade of athletics and legality that has little bearing on the end result. Both groups were paying money to enjoy a dangerous sensation. Both found the routine of life too burdensome to be endured.
     Given our public distaste for chemical adventures, the wholesale endorsement of physical thrills—from bungee jumping to hang-gliding—is something of a mystery. Isn't the danger of heroin the basis for making it illegal? Why are adventurers seen as heroic and addicts as pathetic? Just custom? Or maybe the thrill of physical adventure is "earned" through sweat equity, and drugs are seen as lazy and therefore repugnant.
     The immensity of any potential thrill must be balanced against the smaller, daily thrills endangered by grasping at it. I remember, back in college, a friend of mine once extended a handful of LSD tablets. "Here, take one," he said. "They're great."
    I was sure they were great. But I was also worried about chromosome damage—a false concern, perhaps. "I'm sorry," I told him. "I just can't see my wife someday giving birth to a calf's head, and her looking at me for explanation, and me shrugging and saying, 'Sorry hon, but I just wanted to get high.' "
     Perhaps that is timidity. And, to be honest, I have at times regretted not taking the acid. People speak highly of the experience. That was my chance and I blew it.
     On the other hand, I'm here. Maybe I would have taken the acid and promptly jumped out a window. People do that. And, in balance, measuring the potential fun of a 24-hour LSD trip versus the 17 good years I've had since then, I think I made the right decision. Normalcy isn't that bad. It can even be thrilling at times—provided that your wife doesn't go around making a ruckus.

                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 19, 1996