Dan Biss: "This is the moment to do it."

     Choosing the Republican belief that has most damaged our country would be a challenge, like picking just one chocolate from a newly opened box of Fannie May, though without the pleasure.
     Would it be the lie that immigrants are bad for the country? The denial of any science that conflicts with corporate interests? Or maybe the notion that law should enforce Christian orthodoxy?
     How to choose? There are so many!
     Myself, I would go for the insistence that government is bad and politicians are bad. The mendacious mantra that gets amateurs like Donald Trump elected: Look, our man is untainted by experience.
     Anti-government cynicism is contagious. After Illinois elected sour multi-millionaire Bruce Rauner as governor, Democrats looked at his dismal record of failure then served up its own pair of I’ve-never-done-this-but-I’d-like-to-try candidates, J.B. Pritzker and Chris Kennedy.

     It’s easy to overlook a candidate hurrying after them, boosted by government experience but handicapped by his lack of a personal fortune: state Sen. Dan Biss. I mentioned him in a column and he phoned.

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Flash: column has impact

     I like to say that my writing never changes anything. First because it's true, not just for me, but generally. The entire liberal media speaking in a strong, clarion voice couldn't stop Donald Trump from being elected. One voice is just a twig snapping in a bonfire the size of a barn. Besides, there are enough self-important blowhards in this business; recognizing the lack of impact—the chorus of crickets as I think of it—is a bolster against ego. 
      I'm okay with that. I'm not trying to topple administrations or drag hidden wrongdoing into the light. Other folks are busy doing that. And I'm not inclined to try. What I'm trying to do is write something interesting, to tell you something you don't already know. Corruption has a sameness to it that, frankly, bores me.
    This story started 31 years ago, before I was on the staff of the paper. I wrote freelance for the school guide, the five-times-a-year insert in the paper, and wrote a story about the Chicago public high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail. I don't know where the idea came from; someone probably suggested it. The story became one of my favorites, for the unexpectedness of a high school in Cook County Jail, and for what the teachers had to say, and what the students were being taught. The story stayed with me, lingered, and when I realized that 30 years had almost gone by, I wanted to go back.
    Only I couldn't get permission. Tom Dart was mad at me for a quip I made about his mayoral run—or so I thought—and refused permission. But I eventually broke him down—I am nothing if not dogged—and then went to work on the CPS bureaucracy, which was even more determined to thwart me. I went to an editorial board meeting to corner CPS head Forrest Claypool, and wrote a blog post denouncing his underling for ducking my calls.
    It worked, eventually, and I got into the jail. I had sworn that my visit would be benign--I wanted to write about the school, the teachers and the students, period. "This isn't 60 Minutes," I told them.
    So I almost felt bad when disgruntled teachers began calling me, in the wake of my visit, complaining of poor management, of students being given credit for classes they never attended. I included their accusations in my story—I felt I had to—but also felt like I had deceived the CPS administrators: here I had promised this light, off-beat story, and suddenly charges are being leveled.
    Dumb of me, I know. But there you go.
    Anyway, the accusations made by those brave teachers started the gears turning for an Inspector General investigation, the results of which my colleague Lauren FitzPatrick revealed in the paper Wednesday, detailing hundreds of students being given credit for classes they never took including, most startlingly, one student who was listed as attending classes after he had been killed. 
     I'll be honest—as much as I believe nothing happens due to the stuff I write, I still felt proud to have gotten the ball rolling. I always say, you pull at the smallest, the most obscure and remote thread, and it can take you interesting places.

Art in Chicago: "You're surrounded by it everywhere"

"Balloon Dog (Blue)" Jeff Koons (Broad Museum, Los Angeles) 

     If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I name three living Chicago artists I’d be a dead man. Oh, I’d reel off Tony Fitzpatrick and Hebru Brantley easily enough. Then “boom!” because I couldn’t think of a third to save my life.
     Which I’d be too embarrassed to admit if I didn’t suspect that this is two contemporary artists more than most readers could manage.
     Chicago is not really an art town. Yes, Expo Chicago, the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, kicks off Wednesday at Navy Pier. And yes, we have wonderful public art, highlighted last month with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture. A Miro and a Calder, that Oldenburg bat column and Dubuffet’s “Snoopy in a Blender,” which really isn’t its name, but neither is “The Bean” the real name of Anish Kapoor’s mirrored legume.
     Except for the Bean, which I love, I used to think dimly of Chicago’s public art, particularly the Picasso. But I try to actually listen to the people I talk with, and Michael Darling, the curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, convinced me that this stuff is actually important.

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From Katrina emerged a hero

     I'm afraid to even whisper this. But here goes: do you think the American public was, oh I don't know, let down by Hurricane Irma? Felt, in its secret heart, that they were promised this epic storm, this unparalleled disaster, and the severe weather that gripped Florida, damaging though it was, fell far short? As if the whole thing were an entertainment, a show, an extravaganza, that never quite pulled together.
     Not the people living it, of course. They were relieved, somewhat, although the power outages and flooding and such were no doubt trial enough for them.  

     No one would admit saying this—I'm certainly not. Saying it, I mean. But my gut tells me the feeling is there, just below the surface. 

     Without the promised once-in-a-millennia storm, cable news had to time-fill and tap-dance, sharing what tales it could find, spinning each person being evacuated from their home as a moment of high drama and heroism. 
     We will, perhaps, eventually learn of true tales of heroism, though they will be hard pressed to top "Zeitoun," the excellent book that Dave Eggers wrote after Hurricane Katrina.  

     I wrote this when the book came out, but before the Zeitouns divorced, after the hero was shown to be not so heroic after all.  It detracted from the story, quite a bit, an unhappy ending to an inspiring saga. I don't think it undermines the book, however. Every tale has to end somewhere, and Eggers could not predict the future.  

  
     Out of the fetid floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, where most public figures associated with the 2005 disaster drowned in their own incompetence and failure—a negligent president, an overwhelmed FEMA director, a bumbling mayor—paddles a true American hero, Abdulrahman Zeitoun.
     If "American hero" and "Abdulrahman Zeitoun" do not fit together easily in your mind, then you must read Zeitoun, the new book by Dave Eggers, a Chicago native and University of Illinois graduate. Eggers examines the hurricane that inundated New Orleans four years ago through the eyes of one man and his family. As the storm gathers, we meet Zeitoun, a Syrian-born immigrant who runs a successful remodeling business; his wife, Kathy, a convert to Islam, and their four children.
     Given that too many Americans either know nothing about their fellow citizens who follow Islam, or else clutch at crude stereotypes, this book would be fascinating even without Hurricane Katrina, just for the intimate portrait Eggers paints of the family's life, of the frequent unease of being Muslim in post-9/11 America, the challenges of raising kids and running a business.
     Zeitoun is a man who fits no cliche. The logo of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC is a paint roller ending in a rainbow. Zeitoun picked the rainbow because his painters offer many colors. After his signs and stationery are printed, however, he learns a rainbow also has another meaning. Some customers turn Zeitoun's vans away, assuming it is some kind of gay painting company. New workers see the vans and quit, afraid people will make assumptions about them. After some soul-searching, Zeitoun decides to keep the rainbow, realizing that those who reject one minority tend to reject them all: "Anyone who had trouble with rainbows," he says, "would surely have trouble with Islam."
     Kathy Zeitoun is an equally strong figure, deflecting the constant muttered tweaks of her family. If you've ever wondered why a Christian woman would abandon her faith, adopt Islam and wear a headscarf, after reading about the process that led to her conversion, you'll wonder that more don't.
     As the hurricane looms, Kathy and her children flee the city, to her family in Baton Rouge who can barely tolerate their presence. ("Take that thing off your head," her mother is still telling her, 15 years after she converted.)
     Zeitoun stays in New Orleans, to look after his house, to help, and because he is curious. Katrina hits, but the damage is not bad. Then the levees break, the city floods.
     Zeitoun has a used canoe, bought on a whim, and he takes to gliding through the abandoned, almost serene streets, the antennae from submerged cars scraping his canoe. He evacuates trapped senior citizens and feeds hungry dogs left by their fleeing masters, occasionally attempting to enlist the help of the growing military presence.
     Eggers' writing is pitch perfect, without flourish or excess.
     "He paddled up Claiborne, the wind and rain fighting him, to the Memorial Medical Center, where he knew there were police and National Guard soldiers stationed. As he approached, he saw soldiers in the alleyway, on the roof, on the ramps and balconies. It looked like a heavily fortified military base. When he got close enough to see the faces of the soldiers, two of them raised their guns."
     The official relief efforts are an invading force, blasting around in their helicopters and fan boats, too loud to hear the soft cries that send Zeitoun on another mission of mercy. They remain in the background until—not to give away the plot, which snaps forward like a novel—they suddenly aren't in the background anymore, and Zeitoun is sucked into a nightmare of George Bush's vision of an American security state.
     How he responds, the sustaining power of his faith, how his wife and his extended family around the world react, make Zeitoun required reading, a truly significant book, a guidepost to what America has gone through and where it might yet return unless we hold fast to the principles we claim to revere.
     Zeitoun idolizes his older brother, Mohammed, a famous champion long-distance swimmer in Syria who died in a traffic accident at 24. But judging by the effect that Abdulrahman Zeitoun could have on the world, if this book gets the audience it deserves—it is already a best-seller—his solitary heroism will prove vastly more important. As pious as a Pilgrim father, paddling his canoe with the silent watchfulness of a Cherokee chief, Zeitoun fills an inexcusable void in our culture—the Islamic-American hero: strong, resourceful, loving, patriotic, a man who puts himself in a difficult situation by deciding to stay and face indifferent nature, only to be plunged into a far worse ordeal by the government, as represented by a gang of equally indifferent official goons, stupid with authority, many of whom could have been saved from becoming police state cogs had they the benefit of having read this book.
     Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it, for the simple reasons that it is not heavy-handed propaganda, not eat-your-peas social analysis, but an adventure story, a tale of suffering and redemption, almost biblical in its simplicity, the trials of a good man who believes in God and happens to have a canoe. Anyone who cares about America, where it is going and where it almost went, before it caught itself, will want to read this thrilling, heartbreaking, wonderful book.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 2, 2009

Memo to Jeff Bezos: We're not all like Rahm Emanuel

City Hall bas relief

Dear Jeff Bezos:
     Before we begin, I have to thank you for two things. First, for all the books. Volumes I could comb 100 used book shops — back when there were used book shops — and never find.
     And second, thanks for the Washington Post. I subscribe online, visit several times a day. With Donald Trump president, I would go insane if not for the Post letting loose a fact-based broadside in his direction every day.
     Enough dilly-dallying — I know you billionaires hate to dilly-dally. The country is abuzz about Amazon's competition for your new second headquarters — dubbed mellifluously "HQ2," a reminder of just how wrong "Tronc" really is. Some 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment go with it. Quite the prize.
     My inclination would be to not interfere. But this paper reported Friday that our mayor has been courting you, directly, and I thought I had better step up quickly and say something before he completely wrecks our chances. Let me assure you; Chicagoans are not all like Rahm Emanuel — in fact, it's just him. I've seen our mayor turn on what he considers charm: a high-pressure, in-your-face rattling off of statistics that prove, prove, by scientific method that the only rational decision you could make is to cave in to whatever he wants. I can just see you pressed back in your chair, eyes widening, brushing Rahm's spittle from your cheek with one hand while the other reaches for the buzzer under your desk, thinking, "We gotta pick whichever city in the continental United States is furthest away from this guy."
     Don't do that. Most Chicagoans are much more, ah, human. Rahm notwithstanding, Chicago certainly meets all your criteria regarding size and public transportation and universities and such.

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Preparing for the storm

John Rogers Cox "Grey and Gold" (Cleveland Museum of Art)

    

     There seemed little to do Saturday but wait and watch Hurricane Irma as it neared the Florida coast. Hundreds of thousands fled, while the rest stayed glued to reports. I found myself sifting through the many, many stories I've written about hurricanes and tornados over the years, and paused at this one, worth sharing for its look into the mechanics of how wind damage, expected to be widespread, occurs.

     Tornadoes get into a home through the garage.  
     I did not know that. I always assumed that . . . well, frankly, I never really thought about how tornadoes blow houses over. I thought they just knocked them down like a kid kicking over a block castle.
     It doesn't work like that, according to Kim Fuller of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which called again recently to push its Project Impact, an effort to get communities to protect themselves against tornadoes before the twisters strike.
     I got the impression that the federal government is tired of always going in to clean up the mess afterward and finally figured out that if they got everybody to dig into their pockets to shore up their homes ahead of the fact, the damage next time might not be so great or expensive.
     "Prevention' is a new word for us," said Fuller.
     The idea makes a certain rough sense. The flimsier the home, the easier it blows away (that's why trailer parks always get pulverized). FEMA is trying to get owners of today's spit-and-bailing-wire houses to anchor their roofs down and, particularly, bulk up that garage door.
     I always think of garage doors as heavy, particularly those big two-car models. But when you compare it with the construction of a house, a garage door is a relatively fragile construct: a thin, flexible wall of wood that slides, attached to the house itself by a flimsy track or connected by a pair of pivots (assuming your garage is attached to the house; if not, hey, let the tornadoes come!). If high winds blow out the door, what do you have left, particularly with a two-car garage?
     Right. A big, gaping hole in the house, 20 feet wide, a delicious handhold for a tornado to grab the structure and tear it open.
     "That wind's going through there will take the door right off," said Fuller. "Then it just pushes the roof off."
     Ouch. Can't have that. FEMA suggests that homeowners spend a grand or two to shore up their garage doors and other vulnerable areas.
     "We're trying to tell people that preventative measures do work," Fuller said.  
     That strikes me as a hard sell. How many people don't wear their seat belts, which come with the car? Now imagine you had to pay a dollar to buckle up. Nobody would do it.
     Still, FEMA is hopeful.
     "I'm seeing a change in mind-set," said Fuller. "Last year, since Hurricane Floyd, people are saying, 'Enough is enough.' After the tornadoes in Texas, for the first time, we have community officials saying, 'We didn't know there was something we could do.' It's our responsibility to the public to get the information out. There are very simple things people can do to increase their chance of surviving."
     Tornados are not unknown in this area -- the 10th anniversary of the Plainfield twister is coming up this August. But I just can't imagine there are people cautious enough, or with time and money enough on their hands, to shore up their garage doors against the possible advent of tornadoes. But maybe I'm wrong. You can call the FEMA Hotline at (800) 480-2520 and get more information (and it is an interesting call: "If you are calling in response to a disaster, press 1 now. . . .").
     If you end up reinforcing your garage, call me, too. I think the readers would love to meet somebody who's trying to cover all their bases so completely. Stay safe.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 2, 2000
     

Going (Russian) postal

     Ohhh, I'm a bad person. I am going to hell.  
     Not really. I'm not saying that in a sincere, "my soul is consigned to flames!" sense. I not only never believed in such rococo nonsense, but have trouble believing anyone in the world can believe such a thing, though obviously they do.
    If you read the "ohhh" as more of a groan, you'll get a sense of my sincere, sinking feeling when I realized what I had done, entirely by accident.
     Readers of this blog know that I have a fidelity for truth, for directness, for candor.
     And now I have gone and contributed to the smokescreen of deceit and obfuscation that is the web.
     Quite unintentionally, I hasten to say. Hell, if there were one, is paved with good intentions. 
     And the timing is awkward; just as the truth about Russians posing as Americans and creating anti-Hillary lies during the election is dribbling out ...  well, maybe I had better just tell the story.
     So I'm clicking over the Washington Post, and for some reason I'm told that the cookies on my computer are keeping me from seeing a certain story, and I might want to clean my cookies off my computer. So I figure out how to do that, and wipe out all cookies—bits of information that web sites place on your computer to recognize you and smooth surfing— from the computer. Boxes and boxes of cookies are trashed.
    Of course then I have to sign back in, into Blogger, into Facebook.    
     Into Twitter. Twitter asks me to log onto, not my standard @NeilSteinberg but @RussianPostal, the fake site I set up in March to create an air of reality around the non-launch of my parody Russian postage stamp honoring Donald Trump, created by a New York illustrator and actual postage stamp designer who agreed to help me with the ruse.
    I would never do such a thing in the newspaper, where satire is too often taken seriously accustomed to believing what they're told. But on the freewheeling web, it seemed a good idea. During the last week in March, I started tweeting anodyne announcements about new Russian postal stamps. I figured that would enhance the effect when my Trump stamp was announced.
    Reaction to the Twitter feed was tepid, but it perhaps helped, a little, I think, though the prank was quite successful—my most popular post ever, in fact. April 2 came around. I went about my business, forgetting about Russian Postal.
    Until, prodding by my cookie cleanse, I signed back on. And found that dozens of people had been sending tweets to Russian Postal. Russian people. Sharing their various real-life gripes with the actual Russian post office.
    They complained about lost packages:
   

    They complained about long lines, and send documentary photos:

 

   And bad conditions:

   My site became included in the loop from what looked like actual Russian Post Office trying to help people.

Some defied belief, like the driver who used a package to brace his truck:

     To be honest, if it weren't for the existence of that actual Russian postal service assistance feed, I might leave this up, to give these disappointed Slavic postal customers somewhere to complain, to let them vent off steam, and create the illusion of concern. But such a place actually exists, and might even do some good, and so I've merely created a place where feedback is misdirected. So, not wanting to gum up the system more than it already is, I'll leave Russian Postal up on Twitter for the weekend, in case you can take a look, then pull the thing off-line.  There's enough falsity on the web without my adding to it. Because people are credulous and will believe what they read, as our country is discovering, to our continuing misfortune.