Mueller's Russia probe: the first shoes drop

     History is lived in retrospect, but reality unfolds moment by moment.

     We know that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort turned himself in to the FBI Monday is the first shoe — two shoes, as he was joined by business associate Rick Gates — to drop in the Robert Mueller III investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. For those of us who see the Trump administration as a siege of un-American values, it is an encouraging moment of hope after nine months of continual shocks, of jaw-dropping veers away from responsible leadership and good government.
     But we don't know if it's the beginning of the unwinding of the chaotic Trump administration. Or the beginning of further descent into lawlessness as the president pushes back with all his twittery might. He is already condemning the investigation — by a special counsel his own Justice Department appointed — as a "witch hunt," urging, with the "what-about-this?" reflex that passes for rebuttal of late, that Hillary Clinton be investigated instead. He might still simply fire Mueller, despite the Constitutional firestorm that would ignite.
     Charges against the two include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder millions of dollars and making false statements — charges you can watch already being shrugged off by Republicans who spent years going after will-o'-the-wisps like which email server Clinton used and whether she had broken State Department email guidelines
     This is the first shoe to drop, but there will be others. The way these investigations work is, the authorities begin on the outermost ring of a criminal enterprise and work themselves toward the center. The blind loyalty that Donald Trump demands from all those under him — indeed, from all Americans — is seen differently when viewed in light of a prison sentence. Think of a centipede sitting on the edge of the bed at the end of the day, taking off shoe after shoe, each one bigger than the last, each one falling with a bigger clomp.

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Why all the naked women in art?

     What's with all the naked women?
     See, that's why people hate the media. Here Howard Tullman, investor, patron of contemporary art, the dynamo behind the 1871 high-tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart, a force on the Chicago scene, invites me into his home, his sprawling 5,000-square-foot River West residence crammed with hundreds of arresting artworks and what do I notice? The vibrant colors? The large scale? The dramatic chiaroscuro?
     No. I fixate on that most images are buck nekkid women, pouty, chesty, except for the naked girls who aren't. What's the story here, Howard?
     Tullman just laughs.          
     You can see them for yourself, on the Leslie Hindman Auctioneers website, "Property from the Collection of Howard and Judith Tullman." The sale starts at noon Monday.
     I've known Tullman since he ran Tribeca Flashpoint, a digital media arts college. He's a flashy personality himself, who rubs some people the wrong way — heck, sometimes he rubs me the wrong way.
     But we both are able to get past that. Tullman because he likes publicity, and me because I like talking to a guy who regularly lets drop fascinating bits of information, such as when Rahm Emanuel couldn't get back into his home in 2010, he camped out in Tullman's harem.
     "He lived in my home surrounded by a million naked women," Tullman said.
     Tullman is stepping down from 1871 and selling off about an eighth of his collection for a variety of reasons, like raising money for his arts foundation.

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Lincoln is coming and boy is he pissed.

     Am I the only one to notice that the right foot of Abraham Lincoln is arched upward? As if he's about to leap out of his throne in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and bind the Union together once again? Even if it means, again, kicking the ass of a group of traitors violating every tenet of this once great and proud nation? 
     He looks as if he's just noticed something he doesn't like, maybe a Russian-canoodling fraud and liar living in his former residence. I don't think there's a patriotic American alive today who hasn't had his faith in this country in the sanity and decency of his fellow Americans deeply shaken this past year. But Lincoln is a reminder that our faith has been shaken before, and we have been divided, and suffered before. Actually far, far worse than this. And as ghastly as the particulars are, we are in many way far better than in the past. There is no slavery. The fields of America are not soaked with American blood. Millions of Americans might have blinded themselves to the truth. But others see it, and speak it clearly. And we still have laws, laws that can be mocked and brushed off only so long. Then they slowly tighten around malefactors and justice, inch by inch, is done.
    Or so we can hope.

Rise of printing sparked Luther's Reformation 500 years ago

     There is no evidence that an Augustine monk named Martin Luther, unhappy with a popular fundraising tool of the Catholic Church, actually nailed his list of complaints — the famous "95 Theses" — to the door of the All Saints' Church at Wittenburg exactly 500 years ago. He never claimed to have done so, and the story wasn't circulated until after his death.
     We do know that he distributed them in a letter dated Oct. 31, 1517, to the archbishop, listing his 95 criticisms about the enthusiasm with which the church was selling indulgences.
     An indulgence was a piece of paper that, for instance, shortened the time that had to be spent in purgatory. The church had been vigorously selling them to raise money to rebuild the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
     This bothered Luther a lot, not because he was so liberal, but because he was so pious. He prayed, he fasted, he flagellated himself. Luther was getting to heaven the hard way, and it galled him that a rich man could just loosen his purse strings, dig out a few coins, and cut in line.
     "The treasures of indulgences are nets that are now used to fish for the wealth of people," reads thesis No. 66.

Indulgence issued by Pope Sixtus IV

      You can see an actual indulgence — from Pope Sixtus IV, raising money for an expedition against the Turks — on display at the Newberry Library in a fascinating exhibit, "Religious Change and Print: 1450-1700," that runs through Dec. 27.
     The show connects the beginning of the Reformation to the rise of printing, beginning with a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. The publication of a Bible using moveable type, we tend to forget, was itself a radical act, moving the Holy Scriptures from hand-copied, vastly expensive work owned by churches, into mass-produced, less-expensive reading material that could eventually find its way into the hands of regular people, who could then fancy themselves free to not only read it, but to analyze and dispute what was within. Soon those people were printing books of their own, plus pamphlets and broadsheets. Printing and heresy went hand-in-hand.
     "They're very closely connected," said David Spadafora, president of the Newberry. "Print right away becomes a very important medium for people like Luther to get their views out to a wider public than could possibly otherwise have received them."
     The Reformation, as Luther's protest became known, was not the first break in the Catholic Church— branches had been sheering off since the 1st century, with the Great Schism of 1054 perhaps even more significant, leading to the East and West divisions.
      But Luther's schism gained momentum quickly with the help of printing and the desire of the faithful to take more control of their spiritual lives. Protestantism became important in the march toward modernity, a journey that saw God move from something defined by priests and manifested through relics and miracles, into something practiced by individuals. God went from living in the church to living in your heart.
     After Luther, "faith could not be coerced, and secular powers could not legislate in the spiritual sphere," writes Euan Cameron, professor of Reformation Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
     Though not for lack of trying. The Catholic Church was quick to push back against Luther. Pope Leo excommunicated him in 1520, amid general cranking up of repression, as noted in the Newberry's exhibit, in one of the sharper sentences I've read on a museum wall:
     "No institution better encapsulates the official goals and approaches of the Catholic Church to regulation than the Inquisition."
     Half a millennium ago, remember. They did get better. Because repression only works until it doesn't; then it fuels the fires it's trying to extinguish. "Lutheran" was first used as a slight by Catholic authorities trying to emphasize the human, as opposed to divine, source of these new ideas.
     Luther himself did not want want to name his movement for himself—he wanted his followers to simply call themselves "Christians."
     Martin Luther became famous after his Ninety-Five Theses were made public in 1517, which explains his prominent portrait on the title page of his 1520, "De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae," or "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church." | Courtesy of the Newberry Library
     "After all," he wrote, "the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone."
     Not to give Luther too much credit. Once he started questioning Church authority, Luther was surprised and aghast to find people started questioning him.
     "Definitely," said Spadafora. "That's one of the reasons why on the one hand, Luther really wanted to put Bibles in people's hands, on the other hand, he came to realize they were doing interpretation much more individualistically than even he felt comfortable with." (Nor was Luther, a fervent anti-Semite, comfortable with Jews, but that's a topic for a different day).
     One lesson, in our own time of shifting values and communications upheaval, is the importance of talking to people in the way they want to be spoken to.
     "Luther very cannily begins to use German, begins to use the vernacular and makes sure a lot of his materials are printed in the vernacular," said Spadafora, "vernacular" meaning "common speech."
     "Whereas the Catholic church is relatively slow to respond in the vernacular way. They lose the battle over the argument because they are slower and appealing in Latin to a different audience," Spadafora said. "We see this in social media all the time."
     Today the Catholic Church still dominates Christianity, at least numerically: 1.2 billion Catholics, compared to about 900 million Protestants. Since both groups tend to view Muslim sectarian bloodshed, say between Sunni and Shia, as representing that faith's inherent violence, it might be useful to remind them that modern scholars estimate that 50 million Christians were killed by one another in the centuries of Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggles that followed Luther's brash act.
     That schism has somewhat healed—last year Pope Francis formally apologized for the Catholic side of the slaughter, and the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations have signed agreements within the past decade recognizing the legitimacy of each other's baptisms.

'A change is as good as a rest'

     

     Brendan Behan is not among the first tier of Irish writers: no Yeats, no Wilde, no O'Neill. A poet known for plays like "Quare Fellow" and memoirs like "Borstal Boy," his reputation took off a bit in the late '50s and early '60s before his untimely death, hurried by drink, at age 41. 
     So I don't think I'm admitting too much ignorance saying that I had never heard of him when, some time in the 1990s, I picked up "Confessions of an Irish Rebel" from a table in a bookstore and read its opening lines:

       'You're for the Governor in the morning,' said this dreary red-headed little Welsh Methodist bastard of a screw.
     'Thanks for telling me,' said I, in an almost English accent, as sarcastically as I politely could, 'but I'm not for 'im in the morning or any other bloody time, you little Welsh puff.'

Brendan Behan

     If that doesn't send you rushing to the cash register, nothing will.  He was deeply involved in the IRA and not reluctant to let people know.
     I have no idea where I encountered the other line of Behan's that I love. It's from the play, "Richard's Cork Leg," which I certainly never read or saw. However it got into mind, I find myself quoting it again and again to colleagues at the newspaper as conversation shifts, as it inevitably does nowadays, to the Sun-Times moving next month.
    "A change is as good as a rest," I say, crediting Behan.
    What exactly does that mean? Well change is frightening to contemplate. You won't be where you are now doing what you always do, but going somewhere new, doing something different. The armor of routine is stripped off and you must confront life unprotected.  It requires focus, alertness, the sort of qualities that come to you after taking a break, having a rest. It's revivifying, or can be, if you do it right.
    There's something optimistic to the sentiment, and I'm in an optimistic mood lately. 
    I worked at the old, trapezoidal barge of the Sun-Times building at 401 N. Wabash for 17 years, and I was nostalgic for that when we left. I still have a chunk of the granite facade on my desk. I had an office facing the river, with a sweeping panorama. The windows opened. It was nice. The party when we bid it farewell; let's just say, if you've never been to a party where the guests are literally tearing down the walls with hammers, I have.
     But what can't be avoided has to be endured, and in time—the past 13 years—I grew adjusted to the new building, a less distinctive, yet not without merits setting at 350 N. Orleans. It had its advantages. Closer to the train. Right next to the youthful hive of the Merchandise Mart. Convenient to the East Bank Club. Close to Gene & Georgetti.

View from the Sun-Times offices

      The view, I think I'll miss that the most. Across the river, to the cool green convex of 333 W. Wacker. Stunning. 
      But change happens. A skyscraper is going up, directly south, between 350 N. Orleans and the river, which would cut off our view anyway. Just as well we're on the move again, on our way to the West Loop, to North Racine, where we'll share quarters with a video and sound production company. We're all morphing into one cutting edge communications entity—not a "newspaper" anymore, though I'll continue to use the term, the way my grandmother called her refrigerator an "icebox."
    There is that element, that thought I'm sure older couples have when they sell their house, the house where they raised their children, and retrench to a condo: is this where the decline will set in? Am I going there to die?
     Possibly yes. Or possibly no. I view the move with Buddha calm and equanimity, because the important thing, to me, is that we still have a newspaper—whoops, high-tech cutting edge media entity—to move. It's as far from Union Station west as the current paper is east, and while it isn't as convenient to downtown, it isn't as if I'm always racing off to City Hall to go toe-to-toe with Rahm Emanuel.
    Technology whirs forward, time flows onward, and we're lucky to be in the torrent, our heads still bobbing above the water, gasping and thrashing and sputtering, but very much alive. 
    Speaking of the Irish, Behan once said: “They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues.” I believe that will remain true for the Sun-Times. The land under us might change, but our tongues will continue to wag, unharnessed, soon from the West Loop. 

Military should protect American from militarism

   

     The 2018 midterm election is a year away, and fundraising letters pour into my inbox like a firehose blasting into a bucket.
     Most get ignored. A few I glance at, just to register their breathless urgency: THE LIBERALS ARE TRAITORS! GIVE ME MONEY NOWWWW!!!!
     But one plea, from our neighbor to the north, stood out. Let me, without biasing you as to why, present an email received Wednesday from Fmr. Captain Kevin Nicholson, USMC.
     The letterhead reads: "Marine. Outsider. Conservative."
     The email begins:

Neil,     I’m a proud U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a proud conservative from Wisconsin running for the United States Senate to neutralize the threat of Senator Tammy Baldwin’s liberal extremism.     I joined the Marines because I saw a threat to America and wanted to do everything I could to protect the country I love.     I was deployed to the deadliest place in Iraq just weeks after my first son was born. My team worked to combat the growing threat to democracy around the world.

I can't print the entire message. It ends:

     It’s time to Send In The Marine.     Semper Fi,     Kevin Nicholson, Conservative Republican for US Senate     P.S. As a proud U.S. Marine Corps veteran, I answered the call to serve my country when the threat was abroad. I’m now ready to answer the call to protect my country from the threat in our own backyard.

     Anything stand out? Maybe the same thought occurred to you as occurred to me: "This guy's a Marine."

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'You have to like it better than being loved'

       When talking to young people about writing, I try to get them to think about their audience. To whom is their primary responsibility? To themselves? Their readers? The publication they're writing for? The subjects they're writing about? 
    How do they balance these often competing interests? 
    I maintain that the order is 1) readers; 2) yourself; 3) publication and, 4) subject.  If you put yourself first, riffing on whatever your private fascination happens to be with little regard for its effect on those reading, that's a recipe for boredom. 
    If you put the publication first you're a hack (I believe good writing IS putting your publication first, though your boss might not realize it at the moment). 
    And if you write for your subject, you're a whore, pleasing one person while the rest can go hang.
     Thus you have to expect to take heat from one of the parties lower down the pecking order, particularly subjects, who chronically feel ill-used, no matter how delicately treated. 
     When I wrote a piece about an opera soprano last week, I thought I had hit a sweet spot where all involved would be pleased. I hadn't. The Lyric complained, quite forcefully, and I had to remind them that I didn't write it for them. I am writing for readers who, truth be told, care little for the opera, less for Wagner, and have to be led to the subject via something they do care about, like fitness.  There was no deceit—I explained to the singer exactly what I had in mind. But she obviously didn't quite believe me until she saw it in print, which was a shame. 
     That happens a lot. 
     Regular reader Tom Evans mentioned the column below as an instance where those written about felt ill-used, though he wasn't sure why. I'm reprinting it so you can try to find what the problem is. I have a hunch. This group finds Sherlock Holmes and his world a font of fascination, while my column views them with a certain awe for feeling that way. I didn't share their passion, and that offended them. I didn't do it to slight them, but because a) I'm not a particular Holmes fan and b) I was writing for readers who, mostly, were not in thrall with Arthur Conan Doyle. 
    That's the price you pay for being written about and for writing. As Marge Piercy's great poem about the writing profession, "For the young who want to," ends: "You have to like it better than being loved."

     First, the toasts.
     We all rise, holding our glasses high, and Dr. Franklin Saksena rhymes: 

            She used to sing at La Scala
            And met the king at a gala
            She threatened to send their picture to the king's future wife
            Which was bound to cause a lot of strife
            During the pantomime ball,
            Sherlock Holmes found the pictures in the wall
            But Irene Adler outwitted them all
            What gall.

     He finishes—after a few more stanzas—with "To Irene Adler!"
     At which the dozen men assembled in a pine-paneled party room at Mirabell, a North Side German restaurant, hoist their glasses to the villainess and exclaim "Hear hear!" Then more toasts.
     Welcome to the March meeting of Hugo's Companions, a group devoted to that great detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson. There are about 280 such groups nationwide, 25 or so in Illinois. 

      "What we have here is one of the most vibrant Sherlockian communities in the country," said Donald J. Terras, past president of Hugo's. "No other city I know of in the world has as many Sherlockian groups as we do here in Chicago."
     The Sherlockians regard the Canon—their reverent term for the 56 short stories and four novels about Holmes and Watson written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—with deep affection.
     "We're all pretty much enamored with that time period—a simpler, less complicated time," explained Bill Sawisch, current president of Hugo's Companions. "Holmes and Watson represent what was good in the world at the time. 'It is always 1895' is something people say quite a bit in these groups."
     They are called "scion" groups since they descend from the original Sherlockian club, the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1934 in New York City by journalist Christopher Morley. The oldest Chicago group, The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic)— the "(sic)" is part of the name—was begun in 1943 by Chicago Tribune book columnist Vincent Starrett. Hugo's Companions formed in 1949. There are more.
     Why so many? Why don't Conan Doyle fans all form together into one society with a band of chapters speckling Chicago?
     "That's a very good question," said Sawisch, who is also president of the STUD Sherlockian Society ("STUD" being short for "A Study in Scarlet") and, rather than answering, launches into a protracted digression, an occupational hazard when talking to Sherlockians: "Everything started with the Hounds, Hugo's being the next group, then the Criterion Bar Association. That group started because of Hugo's Companions, with the wives meeting..."
     The participation of women, while settled in modern society, is still an issue here where, remember, "It is always 1895."
     "In some ways it's still controversial," said Margaret Smedegaard, who along with three other wives of Sherlockians founded the Criterion Bar in 1972. "The Baker Street Irregulars started admitting women about 10 years ago, and that helped. There is a recognition that women are just as capable in the Sherlockian world."
     Just as capable . . . of drinking beer?
     "As intellectual, as knowledgeable," she said. "Many of them have written articles."
     After dinner, announcements and a quiz, during which members show an alarming command of the minutia of the story "The Six Napoleons," Tom Evans rises for the evening's entertainment, a talk on "The Real Dr. Watson."
     "There will be no need to take notes in order to pass the test," jokes Evans, reassuring us he will hand out copies of his speech afterward, which he does.
     "I was going to begin by saying the several influences bearing on preparation of these remarks amounted to a 'synergy of serendipity,' but my Webster's unabridged dictionary tells me that isn't quite right, so I will call it instead a 'confluence of coincidences'..." begins Evans, explaining that his talk came out of a request that he toast "this most familiar inhabitant of our Sherlockian world."
     They do recognize the fictional aspect of the tales, if grudgingly.
     "Whether Inspector John H. Watson M.D. is or is not real can be a matter of conjecture," says Evans, whose talk addresses three questions: "Just who was he, what was he really like and, for those eccentrics among you who might hold to the bizarre notion that both Holmes and Watson were fictional characters, what real person might have inspired his creation."
     Twenty-nine minutes later, his talk concludes.
     Young people, for reasons mysterious, are not racing to join Sherlockian groups, and the membership ages.
     "We've lost a number of great people over the years," says Evans. "I don't know how much of a future any of us have."
     The evenings concludes, as tradition dictates, with a reading of a poem by Vincent Starrett called "221B" the Baker Street address where Holmes and Watson live in the stories and, to some, live to this day:
     "Here dwell together still two men of note/Who never lived and so can never die," Sawisch begins. "How very near they seem yet how remote/That age before the world went all awry."

     The poem, thick with yellow fog and splashing hansom cabs, concludes:
     "Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
     And it is always 1895."
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2011