Easy to laugh at Trump's delusions of heroism; harder to realize we all do it.

Trump's delusions of heroism are shared by many Americans.

     Mockery is easy. And kinda cheap. Well, not all mockery. Mocking government officials for political cowardice, for instance, is both important and not that easy, if done well.
     I mean mockery over petty stuff. Particularly physical traits. Whenever someone goes on about Donald Trump's strange hairdo, or tiny hands, or bulging weight, I wince and think, "Really? The man is a liar and a bully and a fraud, not to mention rolling like a puppy at the feet of the Russians and you're bothered because his necktie is too long?"
     Yes, mockery has a purpose. It comforts. The scary thing isn't so scary. Hitler becomes a little man with a funny mustache.
     Though sometimes mockery causes us to miss the larger point.
     Such as Monday, when the president strutted his own imaginary courage before a group of governors at the White House, sparking a firestorm of ridicule. Twitter erupted like the Hindenburg exploding when Trump said he would have reacted to the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with reflexive bravery.
     "I really believe I'd run in there, even if I didn't have a weapon," the president said.
     I'm sure he does really believe that.
     Trump's five draft deferments, when ducking military service in Vietnam, began pinballing around social media. Nothing more need be said. We are already familiar with his comic braggadocio. Just jump in with the #TrumpCoward hashtag, savoring clips of the Cowardly Lion and Trump cringing away from an American eagle. My favorite: an audio clip of Trump yucking it up with Howard Stern in 2008 about an 80-year-old man who fell off the stage during a ball at Mar-a-Lago.
    "You know what I did? I said 'Oh my God, that's disgusting' and I turned away," Trump laughed. "He was right in front of me. I didn't want to touch him."
   

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"Read it like you hate me"

Megaphone, Chicago Museum of History

  

     Maybe I've got this all wrong.
     Here I sometimes feel guilty about posting old columns. Because the world is such a whirling mess, why not grab a fresh horror, dripping, off the hook, and extemporize over THAT? What benefit can rolling some mossy chestnut out of the cool of the cellar offer for anyone beyond myself, what advantage beyond the ease of the proprietor of this fruit stand?
     Then my old friend Charlie Meyerson goes and sends me this:

I cite this great column of yours (with credit to Bey) at least once a week. Why doesn't it live on one of your websites? It should.

     Say no more, Charlie! I can't control what the Sun-Times puts up, God knows. But EGD is my call, so if you want this, you've got it.
     Though .... while I have the attention of the huddled hundreds. Yes, it is a general rule that I never plug other blogs you might visit, because I want you all here, all the time, always. But Charlie runs a valuable news aggregator site called Chicago Public Square and is doing something I'm terrible at: monetizing his efforts. 
     And though I'm reluctant to mention it, out of fear that you'll go there and never come back here, I feel obligated to do so. While acknowledging the possibility that his request for this column was just a clever, cynical ploy to gain attention for his own newly-monetized efforts. If so, as clever cynical ploys often do in this not-at-all-clever-but-certainly-cynical era, it worked—I even suggested promoting his site, which shows how thoroughly I was manipulated into displaying a false altruism entirely at contrast with my true character. The original headline was "A stitch in time."

     Most of us speak in cliches.
     "How are you?" 
     "I'm fine, thanks."
      The same tired phrases, over and over again.
     "What's your opinion on this?" 
     "Oh, it's great." 
     Like pebbles, worn smooth, traded back and forth.
     Nothing wrong with that, really. If we forced ourselves to dredge up something original, or even fresh, every time we communicated, the strain would kill us, or we would lapse into unbroken silences.
     E-mail is worse. Mostly machine-generated come-ons or spare telegraphic phrases. The highest compliment—LOL, or laughing out loud—is reserved for something funny. Original is beyond us, generally.
     One exception is Lee Bey, the director of governmental affairs at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the legendary Chicago architecture firm. I'd say we've been friends since Lee was the architecture columnist at the Sun-Times, but I don't want to put on airs, or sully him by association. Let's say we used to sit next to each other, and we've kept in touch since he left.
     Lee has a way with words—that's a cliche, incidentally; I'm sure he would put it better. I can't tell you how many e-mails of his I've gotten where what he had to say just sizzled off the screen. More than once, I've leapt to put them into print—crediting Lee if the sentiment did not detract from his lofty corporate status, otherwise taking his ideas, happily wiping off the fingerprints and filing down the serial number, and presenting them either as the words of an anonymous wag, or as a genius divination of my own.
     Last week, Lee sent me something that really set off the alarms. He is writing his first book— Paper Skyline: The Chicago That Never Was, a look at unbuilt buildings—and he asked me to read the first chapter and give him my honest reaction.
     Only he didn't say that—didn't say "give me your honest reaction," which is what you or I or most people would write. What Lee Bey wrote was: "Read it like you hate me."
     I immediately rushed to Google. "Read it like you hate me" drew a big fat zero hits ("big fat zero," another cliche, drew 54,800). Ditto on the Nexis database of all the newspapers in the country going back 15 years.
      Nothing.
     Not only is "Read it like you hate me" original, but it conveys the exact right sentiment for somebody trying to write well. Most writers say they want frank criticism when in fact what they want is praise.
     "Read it like you hate me" machetes through that, grabs you by the collar and says, "I really, really want your true opinion, the criticisms you would lovingly tote up reading the work of somebody you loathed." But in six words.
     People who hate you—trust me on this—parse the smallest errors of grammar. They point out tiny logic flaws. They don't sit back and applaud like seals.
     It's Lee's phrase, but I'm proud to be the person who tosses it into the electronic soup. It's perfect. I don't think the thought can be reduced by another letter, never mind another word. Five hundred years from now, on a domed city on Mars, one engineer will brush his fingertips across the forehead of another, transferring a document by micro-field bubble diffusion osmosis. "My report on valve seal integrity for next week's meeting," he'll say, tentatively. "Read it like you hate me."
                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times Jan. 9, 2006

Too cowardly to express raw hatred for immigrants, foes slur them as criminals

     I hate Mexican immigrants. Whenever I hear someone speaking in Spanish, I want to scream. Bottles of hot sauce set out on restaurant tables annoy me. The mere suggestion that the United States is becoming increasingly Hispanic sickens and offends me.
     None of the above is true.
     At least not true for me. In fact, I feel exactly the opposite of each hateful sentiment expressed in the opening paragraph.
     Then why say it? Because these opinions, though rarely articulated, are held by many Americans. I wrote them out to show that it could be done. Frankly, I wish it were done. Because, being unable to state their true feelings, perhaps out of an appropriate if unrecognized shame, they instead make claims that are far worse.
     Take Jeanne Ives, the Illinois state legislator running against Bruce Rauner in the Republican primary for governor.
      Her campaign has produced a number of TV commercials playing upon the fears of Illinois voters. One particularly offensive piece of propaganda features a man named Brian McCann, who talks about how his brother Dennis was killed by a drunken driver named Saul Chavez. He leaps from the specific to the general.
      "Thousands upon thousand of people have been victims of murders, all manner of felonies, rapes, because of illegal criminals that are in this country and we want them removed," McCann intones gravely.

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Regrets and counter regrets

     Photographs contain a lot of information on them. There's the image, of course. But they are also stamped with the date and time—that's nothing new; I have black and white snapshots from the 1960s that have the month and year in tiny type under the picture. 
       But nowadays they'll even tell you where they were taken—that's how I was able to track down the name and address of the bakery in Florence I wrote about last week.  The photo had a little map tucked inside. Which is kinda incredible. 
     There is, however, a downside to all this data tucked into our photos. We lose a certain protective vagueness.
     I noticed this Bitcoin machine in April, 2015 in the Merchandise Mart. It was a curious piece of equipment, and I snapped a photo and wrote a blog post about this strange new currency. 
      I did not, of course, buy any Bitcoins, though the thought crossed my mind. I might buy one for journalistic purposes. I poked at the machine, and came to this conclusion.

     I explored the glowing orange machine screen, but it seemed to only work if you already had an account, and given that it accepts only $20s and $100s, I didn't quite see the point of pumping big bucks into it just to then try to find a vendor who would take the Bitcoins my money would become. Where's the benefit in that?

     The benefit could easily be seen if you look more closely at the glowing screen. A Bitcoin on that day was worth $261.95 (I went online to figure out what Bitcoins cost that day when, looking harder at the photo, I realized the answer right in front of me. One big drawback of so much data is you miss stuff). So if I had gathered together 14 twenties and taken the plunge I would have today ... $9,685, or twice that had I sold my Bitcoin in December before the bubble popped or the tulips wilted or whatever the proper economic metaphor is.
      Quite a lot really. About 40 times profit on my investment.      
     What of it? Regret is vain. And pointless. And something people do all the time, to torment themselves, and the closer their brush with some theoretical path of action, the more they kick themselves for not taking it.
     I never had that particular regret—dabbling in crypto-currencies is a kid thing— until I realized I had been standing in front of the machine on such-and-such a date, and began to wonder just how much I left on the table. 
     What to do? One way to counter such pointless regrets is with what I'll call counter regrets. It isn't as if the only way the past can be viewed is through the lens of actions you should have done but didn't. There are also the actions you shouldn't have done and didn't.
     In 1999, I went to New York to take the Empire State to Europe with my father for a book I was writing. We were standing on a street corner in Manhattan. The light changed and I started to step forward. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back just as a bicycle messenger shot past so close I could feel the wind. I'm glad he did that, I could have been clobbered. But I wasn't. Shame I don't have a picture.
     But I do have the lesson. Which is: why feel bad about the good stuff that didn't happen when you can feel good about the bad stuff that also didn't happen? Or try to anyway.
           

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A critical analysis

     A certain sense of permanence has crept into popular culture. Everything that has ever been still is, all that could be bought is available now. Nothing ever goes away. Prell Shampoo? Bed, Bath & Beyond has got it for $3.49. Record players? Back in vogue.  I counted a dozen different types of butter churns for sale on Amazon.
      Though specifics wax and wane. Raggedy Ann, for instance, and her brother, Raggedy Andy. Very big in the day—I had one, most kids did. It was second only to the Teddy Bear in popularity.
     Now I never see one.
     Okay, not "never." Let's say they've diminished, greatly. Teddy Bears are very much with us. While the Raggedy siblings, well, honestly, their continuing existence would have never crossed my mind if I hadn't come across this pair of Andys—Andi?—at the cute little resale shop that the Northbrook Historical Society runs in its basement. 
     Yes, they're still sold. I immediately found the woebegone creature at right for $14.99 on the Target web site. Just look at him. You'd have to really hate a child to give him that. 
     So what's wrong with Raggedy Andy? Very clownlike, and clowns are out-of-fashion. Who doesn't hate clowns? With the triangular nose adding a jack-o-lantern effect, and while people might be okay with jack-o-lanterns, at Halloween, no child is so frightened as to want to cuddle up with one.
     Plus he seems to be a sailor—he's got a sailor's hat, perched atop his head. It's all very jarring, as was the "I love you" written on a heart on his chest—adults consider it sentimental, but I seem to recall, as a child, viewing it as somehow risque, if not shameful, maybe because the doll had to be naked to see it. It was like a tattoo before tattoos were popular.
     So where did this red, white and blue abomination come from? Raggedy Ann came first—star of a series of books, the outgrowth of an old doll decorated for his daughter by cartoonist Johnny Gruelle, a political cartoonist in downstate Arcola, Illinois. He told his daughter stories about the doll, supposedly, and set them down in a book to honor the girl ... oh, I'm going to hell for this ... to honor Marcella after she died of an infected vaccination at 13. (The anti-vax movement sometimes uses Raggedy Ann as a symbol, another reason not to like the character).
     Gruelle was a James Whitcomb Riley fan—everybody was, at the time—and the concept was something of a mash-up of his poems "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphan Annie."     
     Not the comic strip. That began in 1924, speaking of borrowing. I had an odd, deja vu moment when I re-read "Little Orphan Annie." It begins:

         Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
         An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up,
         an’ brush the crumbs away,
         An’ shoo the chickens off the porch,
         an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
         An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread,
         an’ earn her board-an’-keep;

    It continues in that vein, until:

A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales
‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
    Ef you
      Don’t
        Watch
           Out!

    At which point I almost tensed up, because here my mother would tickle us and we would writhe with glee. It's a shocking memory to discover, this James Whitcomb Riley moment in early 1960s suburban Ohio. It's like seeing the sun flash off water and suddenly remembering rafting down the River with Jim 'n Huck. Did I do that?
    Maybe that's my problem with Raggedy Ann and Andy—they have the aura of something borrowed, something artificial. Reading over tales of the Raggedy story origin, I start to suspect whether Gruelle's daughter ever played with the old doll at all, or whether it was all a commercial sham. cooked up by her dad. (Reading the original 1885 poem made me also wonder whether Annie was originally black, which would nudge Raggedy Ann into the realm of cultural expropriation, like Elvis stealing the blues. But no, there was a real model for Annie, Mary Alice "Allie" Smith, an actual white orphan who lived with the Riley's when the poet was growing up. The dialect is 19th century rural Hoosier). 
     Though my suspicions, if not actual enmity, is  also odd, because as a tot I definitely had a small Raggedy Andy, and he was a favorite toy—I remember him threadbare, his face half cuddled away, his cap gone, yarn hair thinning, scalp peeking through in the back. His loss in the mid-1980s—in a bag accidentally thrown away by workmen—was mourned, a moment mentioned in my Failure book. You might say that the dolls are cheap or, to be charitable, you could instead say that they're designed to be worn, broken in, loved. Maybe it's just the new ones that are repulsive. The old, battered dolls have earned forgiveness.
     The stories were sold first. Chicago printer P.F. Volland brought out a book, Raggedy Ann Stories for Christmas, 1918 and some forgotten Marshall Field window dresser slapped together a doll to accompany the book in a window display, as a publishing promotion. But customers wanted the book and the doll, leading to "the oldest continuously licensed character in the toy industry," according to Tim Walsh, who includes her in his epic Timeless Toys.
     Walsh goes to bat for her. "If her story doesn't pull on your heartstrings then you just might need a hug yourself."
    Maybe I do.
    To find out, I thumbed through Raggedy Ann Stories. At first, it makes the modern reader want to leave some flowers on Maurice Sendak's grave, if not disinter Theodore Geisel and kiss him on the lips.
    The kind of wooden, artificial dialogue that Where the Wild Things and Dr. Seuss swept away. 
     A little girl finds a doll in a barrel in the attic and brings her to her grandma, who repairs a missing eye: 

     "Now!" Grandma laughed, "Raggedy Ann, you have two fine shoe-button eyes and with them you can see the changes that have taken place in the world while you have been shut up so long in the attic! For, Raggedy Ann, you have a new playmate and mistress now, and I hope you both will have as much happiness together as you and I used to have!" 

     Reading the book made me never want to use an exclamation mark again. Ever! For the rest of my life!
     Ann has shoe-button eyes—as befit her antique nature—she was 50 years old when the story begins in 1918; shoe buttons, it goes without saying, were used to close shoes, and people had extra around the house, like power adaptor cables now.
     In the story, as soon as the coast is clear, RA and her fellow dollies come to life and go on adventures, gorging themselves in the kitchen until Marcella blunders in.
     "Just as their mistress came in the dolls dropped into whatever positions they happened to be in." 
     Does that remind you of anything? Any popular toy-centric movies? I noticed that too. 
     There are elements banished from popular culture. A black laundress for one, Dinah, who never would make the cut today. She talks in a thick Southern accent.  The washing is done out back, in large open boiler stirred with a broom handle. Ann is going through the wringer, quite literally, when she is rescued.
     "Jess lemme hang Miss Raggedy on de line in de bright sunshine foh haff an hour," Dinah says. 
     Dried off, Raggedy Ann becomes the tail of a kite, searches for a lost dog (named "Fido," and no, this didn't popularize the name. Abraham Lincoln had a dog named "Fido.") She falls in a bucket of paint. She floats down a river, looking very much like Ophelia among the reeds.
     She has to face down a pair of fancy new dolls, Thomas and Annabel, show up and vie for Marcella's affection (really, Raggedy Ann Stories reads in places like a shooting script for "Toy Story." I seem to be the first person to have noticed it). The intruders chat haughtily among themselves:

"Did you ever see such an ungainly creature!" 
"I do believe it has shoe buttons for eyes!"
"And yarn hair!"

     Okay, I admit it. By the time I finished Raggedy Ann Stories I was, if not won over, then quite charmed, convinced that oblivion, if that is indeed their fate, is undeserved. And maybe premature—the centennial of the first book's publication is this Christmas, so maybe the whole thing will take off again. Gruelle's artwork really is quite lovely.   
   Although the ending of the first book—Gruelle would go on to write nearly two dozen more—made me doubt the story of Marshall Field's window: Raggedy Ann is taken away by a friendly stranger, first bouncing Marcella on his knee, a scene sure to make the #MeToo movement cringe. He takes her to a factory and allows her to be copied into "hundreds and hundreds" of sisters who then enter the world (Yet another "Toy Story" touch: the hero confronting being replicated into merchandise). The book ends with:

    "For wherever one of the new Raggedy Ann dolls goes there will go with it the love and happiness that YOU give to others."

     Here I thought this sort of thing started with the Ewoks.

The numbers don't add up when it comes to arming teachers

     You don’t need trouble grasping big numbers to believe in God.
     But it helps.
     Whenever a foe of evolution explains how some natural wonder, the human eye say, is so complex it just had to be created by Divine intelligence, I know we’re dealing with someone who has can’t — or, to be kind, won’t — wrap his head around the concept of millions of years. Who has no patience for the slow evolutionary crawl from single-celled organism to giraffe that science has mapped out in its gradual glory.
     Which is fine, as far as that goes. I begrudge no man his illusions. A pretty story helps us get by.
      It’s only when they insist that their origin fable be taught along with science in public schools, as co-equals, that I raise an objection. Because one is solid fact, and the other a tissue of fantasy, and musty, millennia-old fantasy at that. There is still a difference.
     Not that religion has a monopoly on innumeracy. Gun ownership — while a fun and unobjectionable hobby for most —
has become a redemptive religion for others, for a minority who, alas, drive the conversation about guns in this country. It isn’t about hunting quail or shooting targets or collecting, not anymore.
     It’s about belief. And ignoring big numbers.
     Generally. The National Rifle Association, their papacy, has no trouble grasping big numbers such as millions of dollars, and understanding exactly what those mega-bucks can do when purchasing politicians.To continue reading, click here.

How Billy Graham got me fired

The church at Gloucester by Childe Hassam (Met).

     Rev. Billy Graham died Wednesday, and the Sun-Times posted the obituary I wrote about him. A number of  readers in their comments lashed out at him as an anti-Semite, though I think the truth is more complicated than that. He was a presidential sycophant. Yes, he was caught on tape running down Jews with Nixon. But the reason, in my estimation, is more that Graham agreed with pretty much anything any president had to say, out of habit and self-preservation, rather than any particular hatred of Jews.  If Nixon had carried on about how much he loved Jews, and how great they were for America, Graham would have agreed with that too.

      While being a toady was only one aspect of Graham generally failing to do his moral duty, he had his positive moments too, particularly as he got older. No, he didn't strangle his son Franklin, which would have been a true service to humanity. But he could stand up to wrongs that weren't coming from the Oval Office, such as this episode I recount in a 2000 column.

     I've always liked the Rev. Billy Graham. Even though an offhand comment he once made to me ended up getting me fired.
     But I'll save that tale for the end.
     I like Billy Graham because he speaks and acts as if Jesus Christ really meant all that stuff about love and forgiveness, and wasn't just filling time between miracles.
     Graham passed unscathed through an era when many lesser preachers were ruined by scandal. The Swaggarts and Bakkers who either got too big or too rich or just stopped being ministers and became politicians or entertainers or, to be blunt, clowns.
     I'm not saying that Graham is perfect. He likes the halls of power, a lot, and found it easier to baptize Dwight D. Eisenhower than to add his public support for Civil Rights. He was so busy playing kissy-face with Lyndon Johnson that he never realized that a moral man, a man of God, might find reason to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam.
     But his heart is in the right place, generally. He kept himself apart from the aggressive, one might almost say predatory, brand of evangelical Christianity, as best represented by the Southern Baptist Convention, which roiled the waters of interfaith comity by announcing that they would go to Chicago this summer and save Jews and Muslims and other heathen from the eternal hellfire that awaits us.
     Graham gave the Southern Convention the brush off this week.
     "I normally defend my denomination," he said. "I'm loyal to it. But I have never targeted Muslims. I have never targeted Jews."
     He doesn't say the reason, but it's plain. To do so is offensive. It's one thing to thrum your religion as the bright light and infallible road to happiness. All religions do that.
     It is a very different matter to single out particular creeds as being extra worthy of salvation.
     But I'm running out of space, and I haven't told my story about Graham costing me a job. I was the opinion page editor of the old Wheaton Daily Journal, and it fell to me to interview the great man during one of his forays home to his alma mater, Wheaton College.
     The interview went well; as I said, I like Graham. At the end he stood, offered his hand, and said: "You know, I'm friends with Helen Copley"—the owner of the Copley Newspapers, of which the Journal was the absolute smallest—"I don't get to see her as much as I'd like; next time you see her, say hello for me."
     Well, of course I had never seen Helen Copley. I was never going to see Helen Copley. She was planted out at Copley headquarters in San Diego and was never going to show up at the Daily Journal on Schmale Road. But I was amused by imagining the idea of under what circumstances we might meet, and in my column describing my interview with Graham, I wrote: "Sure—next time I'm over at Bebe Rebozo's house, playing pinocle with Nixon, the Hunt brothers and Col. Ky, I'll give her my regards."
     That was it. Fired, the very next day. I don't know if she ever read the joke. I doubt it. But no matter; the idea was, if she did see it, and phoned in a rage, they would be able to say that I had already been canned.
     No big loss. The sacking sent me flying toward eventual happiness at the Sun-Times. And I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that story over the past 15 years. I always tell it to friends licking their wounds after being fired: Sometimes a boot in the pants can be invigorating.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 4, 2000