Welcome to 50, Ken; now the fun begins

    One benefit of the steadily fluttering calendar pages is that Facebook serves up columns from years past, based on whatever today's date happens to be. 

     Another is that time's effacing hand scrubs clean, allowing me to experience my own writing with the fresh eyes of any other reader. They're both suited to my biase s— they should be, I wrote them — yet also new discoveries. 

     I would envy anyone who thought to view the Ken doll's 50th birthday through the lens of that bard of lumpen middle age, Philip Larkin. That the writer was me, well, age is not without its compensations. 

     Ken, you're 50? My God! Welcome to the club, old bean. I reached the big 5-0 last June. Where does the time go? I hope you finally scored with Barbie and didn't just spend the past half century squiring her from prom to mall in her pink Mustang, only to be shown the gate of that Malibu Dream House as soon as G.I. Joe stops by. Barbie seems the type.
     That would be hard to take: 50 years since Mattel introduced you, 50 years dwelling in the shadow of the world's biggest clothes horse, the doll world's Stedman Graham.
     But then accepting the disappointments of life ("the unbeatable slow machine that brings you what you'll get," as British poet Philip Larkin calls it) is what 50 is all about.
     Or least our 50. Everyone's 50 is different. Barack Obama's 50—coming this August means being president of the United States, which must soften the sting somewhat.
     Maybe not so different. President or poet or plastic doll, the cumulative story of your life drains the bitterness out of 50, or should, as it dawns on you: This Is It, good and bad.
     At 50, you begin to notice the husks of used years, discarded behind you. "I have started to say/'A quarter of a century'/Or 'thirty years back' " Larkin writes. "It makes me breathless/It's like falling and recovering."
     Not to me. To me, there is a wonder to gazing back that far. Thirty years ago? 1981—the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Approaching each story as if it were a difficult ring puzzle, shaking it. Parading my 21-year-old self by the disinterested, flanneled Wisconsin lovelies.
     Bleh, I'm happier now, doing this. There are two ways to view doing the same thing for 30 years. 1) You can wonder why you haven't gotten it right yet or 2) You can realize: Gee, I've been doing this for so long; I must like it.
     Work strikes me as essential to a tolerable 50, Ken, old sport. I know you've been through many professions — airline pilot, actor, whatever. I suppose that makes for a rich life. Me, I find myself contemplating that Noel Coward line, "Work is more fun than fun."
     At 32, work for Larkin was a day job he pictured as a toad and resented. "Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?"
     By 50, employment had changed for him. "Toad Revisited," begins, "Walking around in the park/Should feel better than work" and ends, "Give me your arm, old toad/Help me down Cemetery Road."
     At 50, old age, while still distant, has taken out the instruments of torture and displayed them before you. Yet somehow, this doesn't bring fear so much as focus. There is no point in getting all worked up over nothing, the way younger people do. Happiness studies reveal a U-bend in life — you're pretty happy in your 20s, get more miserable as you age, bottoming out at about 45 — on average, though I can vouch for that — and then progress steadily upward in contentment until 70-year-olds report they're happier than 30-year-olds. It turns out that wrinkles aren't so bad after all.
     Not an issue for you, Ken, is it? You seem a permanent — what? — 26? I remember 26, struggling, rudderless; I think being forever stuck at that age would drive a fellow mad.
     In "On Being Twenty-six," Larkin deems it the age "when deftness disappears," a fallen state requiring 54 somber lines to relate ("A last charred smile, a clawed Crustacean hatred, blackened pride...") while 25 years later, he dispatches 50 in 15 breezy lines: "The view is fine from fifty/Experienced climbers say" happily trodding downhill toward death.
     Ah death. Not a concern for you either, Ken, old squire. Nor, to be frank, for me.
     I've read enough Seneca to take the sting out of thoughts of being dead — you don't go around bewailing that you weren't here 200 years ago. Why beat yourself up because 200 years from now you won't be here either? That seems an ungrateful response to the gift of ever being here at all.
     Besides, 50 isn't as old as it once was. In "What Fifty Said," Robert Frost says "Now I am old" contrasting, how, when young he "went to school to age to learn the past," but "now that I am old my teachers are the young ... I go to school to youth to learn the future."
     That's the ticket, Ken. How you view what's to come is usually a good thermometer of how old you really are — if the future is a menacing blur, a scary fracture from the comfortable and decent past, then you aren't seeing it properly and need to look again.
     No rush. Robert Frost was 50 in 1924, meaning he had only another 39 years left to write poetry. I'd sign up for that. As for you, Ken, old chum, well, maybe it's time to give Barbie another go. To yearn for something, to try, despite past failure and slight hope of success, is not too far from being young again. You've been at it this long. Why quit now?

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 2, 2011

Chicago shaped a Taiwanese leader

Annette Lu

     As Chinese president Xi Jinping cements his perpetual hold on power, the world's most populous nation searches for ways to exert its growing strength, and its attention falls, as always, upon neighbor Taiwan. I was fortunate enough to visit Taiwan almost 15 years ago. An associate asked to read a profile I wrote about the vice president of Taiwan, so I'm posting it here for that purpose. But feel free to read it as well.

     Annette Lu does not look like a woman who could open her mouth and start World War III. Petite, soft-spoken, she has a fondness for knitting, and keeps a bag of afghans made during her years in prison tucked away in her enormous office.
     Indeed, most of the time, the University of Illinois graduate and vice president of the Republic of China speaks with the measured formality typical of Asian politics.
     "On behalf of the people of Taiwan, we really appreciate President Bush's goodwill and assistance," she says, relaxing in a lacquered chair in a reception room in the Presidential Palace.
     But as with so much in political life here, appearances deceive. Amid her tendency toward Chinese aphorisms and 1970s-era feminist rhetoric lies a blunt message that—more than Islamic terrorism, more than the hot-button issues of the Middle East—holds the potential to draw the United States into the next global war.
     "Taiwan remains as separate and independent as any other sovereign state no matter what," she says. "Under the name of Republic of China, or Taiwan. Recognized or unrecognized . . . we exist."
     To understand the daring of those words, the knife blade that Taiwan—and with it the United States—balances on, some background is necessary. Communist China considers Taiwan a renegade province, a breakaway state destined to return to the fold, and has committed itself to use military force, if necessary, to keep Taiwan from declaring independence. Lu's words draw right up to a line that many think would provoke an immediate, military response. In the meantime, Beijing heaps scorn on her far beyond the usual rhetoric, with the state-controlled press referring to Lu, at times, as a "lunatic" and "scum of the nation."
     Nor do they limit their reaction to words. The election of Lu and president Chen Shui-bian—whose platform leaned toward independence—was enough to send the communists lobbing missiles into the Straits of Taiwan,one of the "tests" that are in fact expressions of official unhappiness and demonstrations of military might.
     The United States, in turn, has announced it would meet any communist attack against Taiwan with a strong military reply, setting up a dynamic where armed conflict between the superpowers is somewhere between inevitable and unthinkable.
     Nestled in the shadows of the two superpowers stand 23 million Taiwanese, living in a wealthy, Westernized democracy, but a young one, only a decade removed from its first true, two-party election, a transit from authoritarianism aided significantly by Annette Lu. Her life, extraordinary as it is, running through an amazing series of contrasts—Illinois farm town and Chicago; Harvard and a solitary confinement cell; feminist activism and the male world of high elected office—also presents a handy primer for the complex history of modern Taiwan.
     She was born Hsiu-lien Annette Lu (it is common for Taiwanese to assume English first names) in Taoyuan, about an hour from the capital, in 1944, when Taiwan was under Japanese occupation.
     Then as now, female babies were not highly prized in Chinese culture, and Lu's parents—middle class business people—tried to sell her, twice. Both deals fell through.
     At the end of World War II, Taiwan was returned to the Chinese Nationalists who—as the Japanese had—used Taiwan as a colony to be exploited, siphoning off funds to battle Mao Zedong's Communist rebellion. In 1949, the Communists defeated General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, and the Nationalist army and government fled to Taiwan along with several million supporters. For the next 20 years, the Nationalists—through their party, the KMT—claimed sovereignty over all China, awaiting the popular rebellion they expected to return them to power. It never came.
     By the late 1960s, however, China, pushed to the brink of ruin by its Cultural Revolution, began to take a different approach toward the West. About this time Lu, an outstanding student, graduated from the National Taiwan University and headed to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a master's in political science. She chose the U. of I., she says, because it was one of the few American schools with any significant population of Taiwanese students.
     She was disappointed, she says, with the bleakness of Urbana. Chicago, however, was another matter.
     "Chicago was very attractive to me," she says. One of the attractions of Chicago was public protest—which had been brutally suppressed back home.
     Lu, who rose to national prominence in Taiwan as an outspoken feminist, credits the tumultuous women's movement she discovered in Chicago for putting her on the path to political power.
     "There was a national convention of women organizers held in Chicago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the suffrage of American women," Lu says. "My feminism was enlightened in Chicago in the summer of 1970, and I began to speak up."
     Returning to Taiwan, Lu spent the next six years working for the government and becoming increasingly outraged at the role of women there.
     "When I got home I was shocked there were debates over how to prevent women from attending university," Lu says. "The authorities thought it was a waste for women to attend college. I decided to take up the issue. "
     She began agitating to bring American-style freedoms to Taiwanese women. She didn't get far.
     "I was totally frustrated," she recalls. "So I went to Harvard."
     While Lu was studying the Constitution, Richard Nixon was opening the West to the People's Republic of China. The PRC was willing to thaw relations, but demanded derecognition of Taiwan as its price. In 1971, Taiwan was booted out of the United Nations, and the next year communist China took her place. The "Shanghai Communique" of 1972 turned the established order on its head—instead of there being one China, with Taipei as its legitimate head, there was now one China with what was still called Peking as its theoretical authority.
     "Before 1971 was the myth that the Republic of China represented the whole China," Lu says. "And after that another myth was created that the PRC represented Taiwan."
     As Taiwan was being frozen out by the Western nations which, one by one, chose huge markets over democratic freedoms, its own authoritarian regime was shifting. Chiang Kai-shek—who died in 1975—had, in the last years of his life, begun turning power over to his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was much more willing to permit reforms than the aging generalissimo had been.
     In early summer of 1978, Lu was working toward her fellowship at Harvard Law. But she couldn't concentrate on her studies.
     "I worried that the United States would derecognize Taiwan soon. From my research I knew it would happen," Lu says. "However nobody at home was aware of that because there was no freedom of the press at all, so nobody at home knew of that."
     She consulted with her faculty adviser.
     "I consulted my professor, and said, 'Do you agree if I gave up my fellowship?" remembers Lu. "He said, 'You're nobody here. But perhaps you'll be somebody at home. Why not go home?' "
     She did, but soon discovered she wasn't in America anymore.
     "The spirit of the First Amendment educated me that I should have the right to criticize the government," Lu says. "So I criticized it. I was charged with sedition."
     In 1979, Lu was found guilty for a 20-minute speech she delivered—on "Human Rights Day" ironically enough—as part of a famous protest known as the "Kaohsiung Incident." A group of activists had, in delivering their addresses, touched off a riot.
     Lu first was kept in a military prison and then, after her conviction—she received a 12-year sentence—at the ironically named Benevolent Rehabilitation Center.
     "It was certainly not as bad as the Gulag, however it was nothing comfortable," Lu says of her 5 1/2 years in prison. "The first stage was totally incommunicado. That was horrible. No one else to speak with, to talk to, with the exception of interrogators: two men and two women. They kept interrogating me, day in and day out and nothing to do."
     Her mother, shocked by Lu's arrest, grew ill. While she was ailing, Lu went on a hunger strike, trying to see her, to no avail. The government produced a doctor who certified that Lu's mother was not really ill; the next day she died, still a painful thought to Lu.
     While in prison, Lu wrote books, sometimes on toilet tissue, which were smuggled out of the prison.
      "Many of my books were banned right after they came out," she says. While in prison, Lu developed cancer, and her illness, coupled with pressure from groups such as Amnesty International, led to her being released with less than half her sentence served.
     She returned to a Taiwan starting to recoil from the corruption and violence of the Chiang Kai-shek years, a nation realizing that democracy was the road out of international isolation. Lu again took up the cause of women in Taiwan, setting up help hotlines and organizing career workshops for women (and, to be fair, cooking competitions for men).
     As in America, publicity can turn to political power. In 1992, Lu was elected to the legislature, representing her home district of Taoyuan. It was the first election where the old Nationalist Party—the KMT—was seriously challenged by a new party, the DPP, which grew out of the same opposition group that had sparked the Kaohsiung protests.
     In the late 1990s, Lu became an adviser to President Lee Teng and served as a magistrate.
     She returned—in an unofficial capacity, of course—to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention in 1996.
     "Chicago changed so much," she says. "It's beautiful now."
     She was added to the presidential ballot of Taiwan's DPP in 1999 mainly to draw on her popularity—much in the same way that Geraldine Ferraro was named the running mate of Walter Mondale. But unlike that ill-starred pair, Chen and Lu won.
     Lu's tenure has been anything but placid. She touched off a major sex scandal when—supposedly—she phoned a reporter and said the president was having an affair with his secretary.
     Lu's feminism is of a type that might strike many Americans as extreme—"Marriage is not the best choice for women," says Lu, who has neither wed nor had children—and she is not famous for her humility.
     "In many countries the women's movement didn't start until democracy has been in practice," she says. "I would say, thanks to my efforts, Taiwan started both feminism and democracy simultaneously."
     She is proud that she is the first elected female vice president to wield power in 5,000 years of Chinese history and hopes that someday someone in America will follow in her footsteps.
     "I thought you would have had a female vice president sooner than us," Lu says. "I think I run faster than my sisters in the states—I came from prison to a palace. But my sisters in America still have a little way to go."
     As with most Taiwanese leaders, she is very concerned about the Taiwanese money and manpower now flowing to the mainland.
     "No one can really stop it," she says, "it is a tide."
     But she sees the Taiwanese as crucial, as managers and workers, to the rapid economic growth of China—"Without support from Taiwanese, China wouldn't be able to take off so quickly"—and thinks self-interest will keep the mainland, despite their harsh rhetoric, from attacking Taiwan.

      The larger question, she says, is whether that investment will bring the two nations closer to peaceful coexistence, or merely strengthen China and hasten the day when it tries to seize Taiwan.
     "For the past five decades, the PRC has always played two cards toward Taiwan—carrot and stick," she says. "People here are used to that. Yes, they are increasing their military, their ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan.On one hand, they prepare to intimidate Taiwan or even attack Taiwan. On the other hand, they smile on us. They try to seduce the Taiwanese people to go to the mainland and spend money, to contribute to their development."
     That is why, she says, Taiwan needs to be militarily strong and why the United States needs to help.
     "It's certainly in the best interest of the United States to safeguard Taiwan," she says. "Taiwan is one of the best allies the United States has. If Taiwan is taken over by China, then China will be in and out of the Pacific, a continental hegemon and a marine power that would be very much a threat to the United States."

COMING MONDAY: Part II: Security: Taiwan on the Knife's Edge.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 14, 2002

'Somebody loves this woman ...She's probably heartbroken'

Rings (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Two days after Valentine's Day, Liane Troy went to the 10 o'clock water aerobics class at the East Bank Club. Afterward, she was on her way to a meeting of the Foundation for Women's Cancer when she saw something glistening in the melting snow by the bus stop at Orleans and Hubbard.
     She picked it up, wrapped it in a napkin, threw it in her purse, and went about her day.
     A couple days later, the retired educator noticed the napkin, which she had forgotten about. She rinsed off what was inside: not a piece of costume jewelry, but a 14k gold lady's ring, bristling with diamonds.
     "My parents were in the jewelry business," she told me later. "E.S. Ford Jewelry on North Avenue. So I knew it was something that was important to someone."
     Troy inquired at the Starbucks across from the bus stop. She stopped in the 18th District police station. Nothing.
     A friend suggested she go to social media but, as a lady of a certain age, she wasn't going to do that.
     "Being 60 plus, I'm not sure how to go about doing that and reaching the right person in the vast Chicago Metropolitan area," she wrote to me. "Any suggestions?"
      Hmm ... What's that old saying? "To a hammer everything looks like a nail?" To a newspaper columnist, every situation calls for a column.
     Or does it? The Sun-Times not the local shopper. One lost ring will draw other requests. The forehead-slapping carnival of confusion that is our daily politics will go unremarked upon for a day.
     And yet here is one woman who had found this ring, and feels it is important to do something. Plus the possibility of some unknown person out there who may have lost it under circumstances mysterious.

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"Each unhappy in its own way"

Eric Gerard and Ilse Zacharias in "Anna Karenina"

     When I mentioned to a few friends that I had gone to the opening of "Anna Karenina" at the Lifeline Theatre on Monday, they uniformly expressed wonder that Tolstoy's massive classic—my copy weighs in at 968 pages—could be adapted for the stage, a marvel that deepens when you consider that Lifeline isn't some deep-pocketed powerhouse like Steppenwolf or the Goodman, but a scrappy shoestring East Rogers Park company that drapes blankets over audience member's seats because the tiny theater gets cold.
     Not only did they stage the show in under two and a half hours, but they do so admirably, mirabile dictu, thanks to strong performances by young actors and a coherent, stripped-down script that neither lingers nor hurries excessively.
     The whole enterprise pivots on its star, the dynamic and likable Ilse Zacharias, whose face carries the journey from wealthy Russian housewife and mother, hurrying on a train trip to repair her brother's marriage, shattered by infidelity, to agonized adulteress shunned by society and kneeling on the train tracks.
      Alone, she couldn't pull it off. But she's backed a cast so strong I feel obligated to mention a few  individually, so please indulge me. 
     I hadn't planned on reviewing the play—I just went for fun—so didn't take notes. But if I had, I'd have scribbled "John Malkovich-like" blindly in the dark to describe Michael Reyes's performance as Anna's husband, Count Alexei Karenin. Formal and dull, at first, his stiff hauteur cracks into an almost endearing desperation as Anna latches onto the handsome Count Alexei Vronsky, played with the requisite OMG charm by Eric Gerard. I'd have preferred Vronsky be more of a jerk, instead of almost immediately dissolving from supremely-assured rake into doting puppy—a tad inexplicably perhaps. One second he's dumping his adoring Kitty, played with surprising power by the diminutive Brandi Lee, the next he's buying tomatoes in Italy with Anna. Then pining for his club again. An inevitable result of all that plot compression, I suppose.

Dan Granata and Brandi Lee (photos courtesy of Suzanne Plunkett)

     The rejected Kitty soothes herself with Konstantin Levin, your standard issue tormented Russian character, obviously Tolstoy's idea of himself, gazing at his profitable estate and lovely wife and wondering why, why, why isn't he happy? Dan Granata does this so convincingly, for a moment I thought I was looking at myself in a mirror. Aneisha Hicks flies  under the radar during most of the show as Dolly, the wronged wife, only to soar with a bitter monologue reminding Anna that she had coaxed her back into loveless union while wheeling around to find freedom, for a time, herself.
     I can't mention everybody, though by this point it might seem that I have, but must applaud Michele Stine, charged with the thankless task of operating the lifesize puppet that serves as Seryozha, Anna's beloved son.  At first glance, one of those hmm-this-is-interesting directorial choices no doubt designed to avoid the near impossibility of finding a 6-year-old who can both act and stay out until 11 p.m. four nights a week, the audience immediately settles into the pleasure of watching Stine's expressive face go through the joys and panics of a child trying to understand a world beyond his reckoning. It made me wish this weren't an off-year for the Chicago International Puppet Festival, which is saying a lot.
     Kudos to director Amanda Link for how she transforms the bare, tiny stage into a variety of scenes—rail cars and train stations, ballrooms of whirling dancers and a racetrack filled with spectators. Soldiers gamble at a club, aloof pedestrians blow by the disgraced Anna in the frosty streets (Lindsey Dorcus is particularly chilling as Betsy, Anna's supposed friend, who cuts her for doing what she has been urging her to do and does herself). No set changes, barely any scenery or props—a bottle, a plate of cake—and we're in 19th century Russia.
     There are not one, but two births performed on stage, a reminder that the adaptation was written by Jessica Wright Buha as a new mother, with a baby practically on her lap. Without giving too much away, her "Anna Karenina" made me want to re-read the novel—it has been a while—to see if babies have the redemptive role in the book that they play here. My guess is they do; Tolstoy did, remember, have 13 children.
     My wife, often a tougher critic than myself, wished that Anna's morphine addiction had been brought out just a bit—we see her getting it in childbirth, then there is never any reference, and a few gestures might help explain her decline from pillar to ruin. She also was sorry that Hedy Weiss is no longer around to give it a "highly recommended," so did so in her absence. I agree.
     The motto of the Lifeline Theatre is "Big Stories, Up Close" and when you're sitting 10 feet away from the actors, they really have to deliver, and here they do, to such an extent that I felt the need to stand on a chair, whistle between my fingers and direct your attention to them. Then again, I prefer these small productions to the big Broadway dinosaurs regularly disinterred in the Loop, enjoyed "Anna Karenina" far more than "Le Miz" or "Miss Saigon." 
     The glory of Chicago theater is you can just show up almost any given night at one of dozens of venues and see something that falls between excellent and incredible. Lifeline doesn't score with every production—its 2014 adaptation of "Jane Eyre" left me unmoved. But Lifeline hits the bullseye here, big time, and deserves notice and patronage. "Anna Karenina" runs Thursdays through Sundays until April 8, and the Lifeline Theatre is at 6912 N. Glenwood.



   

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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