State of the Blog, Year Five

American Helmet No. 5 (Metropolitan Museum)

     Five years? That's a David Bowie song, opening his "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album:

   Five years, what a surprise
   Five years, stuck on my eyes
   Five years, my brain hurts a lot
   Five years, that's all we've got

     Fairly apt, or could be, if I quit right now, impulsively—today marks the end of the fifth year of the blog—just to give that last line a little extra relevance and zing.
     But my brain doesn't hurt a lot. It doesn't hurt at all. If anything, it perhaps feels a little lighter, a little less ... intricate the past year. Not that the old gourd is exactly drying out. But maybe a twist of the knob less crackle and pop. Not necessarily a bad thing either. It can give the routine a kind of spareness, an austerity. The extraneous crap falls away and life is reduced to essentials. Which is good. Not that the blog is essential. I do like it. I think of it as one piece, my writing and life, this hillock built a handful at a time in cyberspace. People read it. The numbers are up. I shouldn't lay them out—my wife insists nobody cares about the numbers, and she's right. But I care. It seems a kind of significance. And I'm the boss here, if nowhere else.

No. 5 of Collars (Metropolitan Museum)

      In fact, caring is the central guiding principle of the blog. Caring about this or that wisp of triviality that catches my eye any given day—why maraschino cherries are placed in the center of grapefruits?—to the deepest problems facing our country and world, the hourly assault against the United States of America by its president and his quislings. Monitoring the continual drip drip drip erosion of everything good and decent about our country. Then—squirrel!—veering away to tiny distractions, letting everybody enjoy the flea circus, catch our breath before rejoining the battle, hopefully refreshed. 
     So, five years, caring about the various columns, posts and essays. I write the stuff and correct the typos, even years in the past. I always tell young writers, if you don't care about your work, then nobody cares.
     Not every writer cares. Once, when Nigel Wade was editor of the Sun-Times, he became concerned that the obituary of a certain fiery local religious leader had been written by a Jewish person, aka me. "No problem" that Jewish person said, in a rare moment of self-effacement, asking a colleague, the actual religion reporter, if he wouldn't mind putting his name on the obituary. He didn't care. So  I put his byline on, in amazement. I didn't care that I would take my name off something—what's one less byline, even 20 years ago? The important part, the writing, is the same. And I liked the unusual show of ego negation. Though I was agog that this guy would put his name on a story that he had, first, not written, but also never even read, that he would allow it to be done. I didn't feel contempt, but a species of wonder, as if I had walked in the office and found him licking the floor clean.
     His name stayed on the obit for ... a while ... then Nigel left, and the reporter went off to Colorado, and I slipped my name back on, where it remains, waiting.
   But I digress into old tales, a tendency of aging journalists to be guarded against. On to the numbers:  

             Year One: 385,679 hits.
             Year Two: 499,423.
             Year Three: 577,617.
             Year Four: 730,955.

             Drumroll please ...

             Year five: 886,385

Colt Percussion Revolver No. 5 (Metropolitan Museum)

     Hey! Not bad. A 21 percent jump from the year before. A drop of drool off Milo Yiannopoulos' slavering lips, no doubt. But then we are playing different games. You can draw a crowd pouring gasoline over your head and then setting yourself on fire, too, but what do you do for an encore? I think of this as both small ball and long game. The first, summed up in a sentence I like from last year: "My vegetable garden is not Con-Agra either, and I still plant it every spring." And the second, well, maybe five years from now I'll feel compelled to add a footnote, explaining who Milo Yiannopoulos is (I should probably do that now: some kind of flaming rhetorical freak show, saying vastly heartless and stupid things which people nevertheless feel compelled to pay attention to, right now).

     What I'm trying to say is, I'm not doing this for the notoriety, obviously.
     Now, were I looking for negatives, I could note that the growth rate has slipped from the year before, when it was 26 percent. But I think that's taking the jacket of good news and checking the pockets for bad news. (I suppose I could also observe that I don't know how many hits are actual people, as opposed to spiders from China, or Mars, speaking of Ziggy Stardust, And the numbers were goosed in December by a post that got 50,000 hits thanks to a retweet by Neil Gaiman).

Fish Series No. 5 by Charles Demuth (Metropolitan)

    Although being retweeted by Neil Gaiman is a good thing, right? So I should just accept it as more good news and move on.
    The average works out to 75,147 readers a month, compared to 60,812 a month last year. Which also feels like robust growth.
    This past year was marked by several notables—my first six-digit month, December, at 124,061 hits. My first significant press attention, "Neil Steinberg never falls short on his daily blog," written by the dean of Chicago media journalism Robert Feder. I should probably just refer you to his column rather than nattering on here myself. 
     The point of it all, if you read the very first post, five years ago tomorrow (and if you haven't, you should) is to mine hidden wonder, and I think we've continued doing that this year. We savored a chunk of Chicago artwork copied by the Louvre last July and went up Mayan ruins in Belize in March. We learned about skeumorphism, the Dempsey-Tunney fight and Martin Luther's Reformation. We baked English muffins, buried Hugh Hefner and read "Don Quixote," wherein Cervantes writes "self-praise is self-debasement."
    Ouch. True enough. Better wrap this up. 
    Thanks are in order. 

Five gold earrings (Metropolitan Museum)

      First, to my advertiser, Marc Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake. He has supported this blog from the start, and his holiday ads give a festive air to this effort, plus add sweetness the year around. I always have a cheesecake in the freezer, and encourage you to do the same. It's like having a fire extinguisher--you never know when you're going to need it.
    Thanks to the Chicago Sun-Times, for giving me a home for the past 31 years, and for tolerating the blog with a splendid leonine indifference, the old king gazing across the savannah while the cub scampers and rolls and gums his tail.
    Thanks to all my colleagues, at the paper and across the city, country and world, who have read this, enjoyed it, remarked upon it, retweeted it, criticized it, pointed out typos, and in general treated the blog as a legitimate center of interest and not, as the buzzing cloud of obsessives that gather around any journalistic endeavor insist, on a daily basis, the vacuous yet somehow still noxious effluvia of an imbecile.
    Thanks to my loyal readers, Coey and Nikki and Tony and Thomas and Jakash (and here I better cut off, before I start feeling like Miss Barbara looking through her magic mirror in"Romper Room.") Though not without a shout-out to John O'Rourke, who gives a careful read to the thing every morning and invariably offers up a typo or two. Thanks to my biggest fan, my mother, reading every day in Boulder, Colorado. 
   And of course to my wife, who musters a convincing show of enthusiasm for this, and has stopped suggesting I miss a day out of general principles. You're right of course. Maybe after a decade....

Wanted: US border patrol agents, all ‘creeds, religions, ethnicities’

     The news might crackle with emotion, the cries both of detained children and partisan outrage. But the machinery of the federal bureaucracy whirs steadily onward, undeterred.
     The Choice Chicago Career Fair held on the second floor of the Holiday Inn Express on Dundee Road in Palatine Thursday had tables handing out flying discs and water bottles, ballpoint pens and magnets. It included recruiters from Aflac and Grainger, the Nosh Group and Pet Health and, tucked between the First Student bus company and Just Energy, was United States Customs and Border Protection, handing out lanyards and Post-It notepads and looking for personnel to deploy to our nation's southern border.
     "On the whole southern border," said Orlando Ruiz, an 8-year veteran, who is finding keen interest in CBP jobs. "Everyplace we go, we always do."
     Any why not? The thick glossy brochure titled "WE ARE AMERICA'S FRONTLINE" lists benefits from "10 paid holidays per year" to the federal retirement plan, not to mention "a priority mission of keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the United States."
     Starting pay can be as high as $50,000.
     "As soon as you get out of the academy, you start making overtime," said Ruiz. "Border Patrol makes 25 percent overtime per year."
     Border Patrol agents undergo 120 days of training.
     "Because we are in the southern border, desert. It's tougher terrain," said Ruiz. "We need more training because we work outdoors. Sometimes when you're down there you're by yourself, covering five miles. It is difficult."
     The images of children being torn from their parents has not reduced interest in working for CBP.
     "No, not at all," said Ruiz. "This is a great career. Job security is hard to find."

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This is nothing new...

Pinkertons escort strike-breakers in Ohio

     For nearly the entire first century of the American labor movement, workers organizing to improve their lives have been met with clubs and guns, wielded by compliant police forces and hired Pinkerton guards. Later, attempts to unionize lead to lock-outs and mass firings. Union ranks were peppered with spies, informants and saboteurs. Picket lines were ignored or set upon. It has never been easy.
     To this long history of repression add the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Wednesday in Janus v. AFSCME, ruling that nonunion workers can't be required to pay fees to public sector unions. The case stems from Mark Janus, an employee at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, suing because he felt that his $45 a month union dues violated his right to free speech.  One would think that a case worker would have more pressing things to worry about, but there you are.
    This ruling, allowing free riders to enjoy the concessions won from management but not contribute to the organization that wins them, is considered a devastating blow to the labor movement.
    Perhaps.
    But unions have suffered devastating blows before.
    The Knights of Labor had grown to 40,000 members when it struck for an eight hour day in May, 1886, then lost 75 percent of its membership in the next year, as business owners retaliated and clamped down. 
    Unions still went on to win that eight hour day, the five day week. Sick pay. Child labor ended. Safety regulations put in place, business owners complaining all the while that permitting workers to enjoy healthful lives and decent salaries would be the ruin of them. Donald Trump didn't invent lying.
    No union success was ever achieved without suffering a setback, a counterstroke, retribution and intrigue and betrayal. Every step forward met with a push back.
    Not every setback was from the outside, either. Unions, like all organizations involving fallible humans beings, were hobbled by internal division, corruption, extremism and racism. No account of the obstacles they face would be complete without mentioning them. Sometimes unions played in the hands of their enemies, making it easier for them. Nor have these problems gone away.
    Chicago had a key role both in the origins of labor and in its suppression. Fort Sheridan, remember, was purchased by the Commercial Club in 1887 and donated to the Federal government for the specific purpose of putting a U.S. Army garrison there, to be available to squash union activity in the city. 
    And indeed the troops were put in place and used, once, to suppress the Pullman Strike of 1894. Soldiers got the trains running again.
    This court ruling, coupled with the shameful endorsement of Trump's Muslim ban the day before, is a vindication of the hardball tactics that denied Barack Obama the chance to name Merrick Garland, and instead allowed Donald Trump to install Neil Gorsuch. That, combined with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote, who contributed to past erosions of American liberty, make for a black week, when the true enormity of the Trump disaster began to manifest itself. A man of bottomless pettiness, who hours earlier was attacking a talk show host and a Virginia restaurant, could be the most significant president in 75 years.
    Before Trump could almost be funny, with his wild insults and accusations.
    Now, not so funny anymore. 
   Before, at times it felt like they were winning.
   Now, it feels a little like they've won. 
   Let that feeling settle, for a moment. Let it register. Then shake it off.
   Because these setbacks are also a fire bell in the night to those Democrats still fretting over public comity and how nice they should be. Whether they can attempt the tactics that have worked so well for so long for Republicans. This is smoke in the air. There is no room for indecision anymore. This is disaster that must be battled. The Right is coming to burn up your freedom your livelihood, everything. No one can pretend to be confused or uncertain any more.
    That is the bad news. The good news is the union faithful, the American patriots, have suffered worse defeats. Bruised, battered, humiliated, they never gave up. Neither can we. The battle isn't over. It has just begun in earnest.

Bookstores come and go but books go on and on

     It would seem the perfect business model.
     Your suppliers bring inventory directly to your store, unbidden. It arrives continuously in shopping bags and cardboard boxes. Most sellers don't set prices, but generally accept whatever you decide to pay them. Then you mark up the goods to what you feel the market will bear and sell them.
     Half the time your suppliers hang around while you decide what pittance to offer, then spend the money you just gave them on the marked-up goods that others have previously sold you.
     When I first walked into Half Price Books, I felt a sort of vertigo. The books ... they were so cheap. So very inexpensive. Brand new books, for half of what they cost at regular bookstores, plus shelves and shelves of used books, not at jacked-up antiquarian bookshop prices, but for a few bucks. Sometimes a dollar.
     Now the store in Highland Park is going out of business. A letter posted on the door offers the bright spin:

"The independent bookstore industry has been lucky to see positive growth during the past few years. In fact, Half Price Books has opened two stores in 2018 including our new store in Vernon Hills. However, while things are improving in the book industry world, we as booksellers need to be smart about the business decisions we made."

     That's true. According to the American Booksellers Association, sales at U.S. bookstores are up 5 percent this year. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of independent book outlets rose 35 percent.
     But a rising tide does not lift all boats. Some vessels swamp and sink. The Highland Park Half Price Books closes Sunday, July 8.

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Little Free Library

     Wow, talk about a firehose of reader email. My column yesterday, a plain-spoken reaction to the poisonous eruption of textbook racism vomiting forth from the White House over the weekend, just pinned the needle. I spent a few hours trying to answer, then gave up and began ignoring it—letting a few dozen responses gather in my Spam and Trash folders, giving a quick once over through squinted eyes, then deleting.
      Not that it was all bad—I know I sometimes give that impression. Actually, a large number of people grateful to see reason reflected in the newspaper, easily as much as those outraged to see their support of a flat-out bigot clearly described. The response was a kind of inverse Bell curve—very little in the middle, with steep slopes on either side. 
     For today, I pulled on hip boots, grabbed a squeegee, metaphorically, and went to work trying to arrange the muck into a kind of tableau that could be shared and understood. What supporters of Trump do to rationalize their perfidy is sorta interesting. They focus on the insult of calling them what they are—"You're saying I'm a bigot! I'm offended!"—instead of considering that they're being called this because they carry water for a manifest racist. Or they recast the matter—"This is what liberals do when someone disagrees!"—as if it was a potato-potahto matter of equal significance. "You envision an America where all races are treated as equal citizens, I see a Christian white supremacist state where freedoms are ignored to maintain minority right wing power; can't we just agree to disagree?"
     But a weariness quickly set in. What's the point? To whose benefit? Certainly not mine. Why think on it? I've already done that too much—particularly when you can consider this colorful "Little Free Library" that went up recently in my leafy suburban paradise, in front of Greenbriar Elementary School, where my boys learned their letters, a serene brick structure a block west of our house. 
    Very soon after this charming  purple, orange and green cabinet caught my eye, The Northbrook Tower, a sprightly and readable free weekly, ran an article telling all about the box, crediting Greenbriar librarian Collen Sanchez for the idea. According to the article—by Grady Bruch, editorial intern, credit where due—the concept began in Wisconsin in 2009, and from there spread. Now more than 4,000 Little Free Libraries grace a nation in dire need of grace. I was impressed that this attractive and professional work of folk art was created by Greenbriar students, themselves, not some professional artist elsewhere. Good job kids! Well done. Three elementary schools—Greenbriar, Meadowbrook and Westmoor each have one. 
   Inside is stocked with children's books, free for the taking, though I won't be partaking soon. My house already has too many and I have no one to read them to. Which gives me an idea. The boys of course will want to pluck treasures to delight their own progeny, who'll arrive one of these days, sooner than expected, given how the years have been snapping by. That leaves us with plenty. I think I'll make a habit of, on my walks with Kitty, of taking one from our house and donating it to the Free Little Library, now and then, where it can be savored once again, as books should be. There is joy to life—it isn't all Donald Trump and and self-blinded fans driving a great nation to its knees in shame. There is color and hope and generosity and children's books tucked behind glass doors in Little Free Library boxes. 


 

Donald Trump is a racist leading our country toward disaster

"The Collector" by Damien Hirst

     Let’s consider the lives of a few average Chicagoans, chosen at random.
     There’s … John Wayne Gacy. He was … let’s see … a pedophile who murdered 33 boys and buried them in his crawl space. There’s …Richard Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in a single night of terror. A third? Umm, Jeffrey Dahmer was a Chicagoan — well, he actually lived in Milwaukee but once cruised down to Chicago to find a victim, which qualifies him. Not to forget typical Chicagoan H.H. Holmes, whose grisly killings during the World’s Columbian Exposition are chronicled in “The Devil in the White City.”
     Gosh, those typical Chicagoans are all mass murderers, aren’t they? Makes an impartial observer coolly assessing the facts suspect that Chicagoans are a pretty dangerous lot. I’m surprised anybody dares step foot in the city, packed as it is with brutal psychopaths and twisted killers.
     What’s that you say? This is not a random selection of Chicagoans? Rather, I’ve obviously cherry-picked these individuals specifically because of their depraved actions. That rather than representing the city as a whole, they are extreme exceptions. The vast majority of Chicagoans don’t kill anybody, ever, but are decent human beings just trying to live their lives as best they can.
    I was being deceptive, wasn’t I? And why would I do that?
     Maybe because we just witnessed an identical show of deception on the part of the President of the United States. Over the weekend, Donald Trump replied the national outcry at tearing immigrant children from their families with a loathsome display of deception, exactly along the lines demonstrated above. The president and the White House both firing off tweets of shocking crudity. Here’s one:
     “Laura Wilkerson lost her son Josh in 2010. He was tortured and beaten to death by an illegal alien.”
     And another:
     “We are gathered today to hear directly from the AMERICAN VICTIMS of ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.”

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Cherry on top

     Back in the day, maraschino cherries went in Manhattans. They were useful little items, because when the drink was drained, I could fill that awkward minute before the arrival of the next by digging out the ragged bright little red wreckage and popping them—I preferred two; more festive that way—into my mouth. Ah, life is sweet!
     A small jar of the vivacious little fellows showed up in our fridge—my wife was making sundaes for her book club, one of four uses of maraschino cherries that spring to mind: cocktails, sundaes, fruit cocktails and in the center of grapefruits.
    No Manhattans, sundaes or fruit cocktail lately—we stopped buying fruit cocktail when the kids hit junior high. And grapefruit is out because I habitually eat mine whole for breakfast, peeling them like an orange and eating the entire segments. No slicing in half, ergo no center to place a cherry. And no cherries, usually.
    But the big yellow fruits have been so sweet lately, big-hearted soul that I am, I urge my wife to join me in partaking. She likes her grapefruits halved and segmented. A doting husband, I abandon my preference and prepare them the way she likes them, fussing over the bisected citrus with a little curving serrated knife. Though recently, looking at my half, something seemed missing, and I remembered the jar of cherries, forlorn in the fridge, abandoned since the book club, without Manhattans or sundaes to stir interest (fruit cocktail we bought, ready made, from Del Monte. Nobody composes the stuff themselves out of cans of mushy pears and smooshy bits of apricots—that's how fruit cocktail started, in the 1930s, as the leavings from canning fruit). 
    Voila. The result looked so perfect, I had to snap a picture, and, having the photo, now must write something to occupy you on a Sunday, a perfect day for perfect grapefruit presented perfectly with pizzazz.
    The obvious question: where did this odd pairing come from? The healthy, natural sour yellow grapefruit and this miniature red orb of sweet toxic shame. I remember the practice from the 1960s, which means it had to be a hold-over from the 1950s, when wives made fancy breakfasts for their husbands as part of their general program of keeping a happy home. Maraschino cherries were part of the whole Jello mold, Baked Alaska, parfait world of what passed for deluxe fine dining. Grapefruits were the stuff of resorts—you really had to go to Florida to get proper grapefruits, or have them ship up North in heavy cardboard crates, as my grandmother in Miami did.
    When did maraschino cherries begin being centered on grapefruits?
     First you need the cherries. I guessed "maraschino" had to be Italian, like "mascarpone." Bingo. Marasca refers to a "small, black cherry" grown around Zara, once Italy, now in Croatia, according to the OED, and "maraschino" is a liqueur distilled from the marasca cherry.
    The word is a little over 200 years old; Percy Bysshe Shelley puts it in the mouth of one of his characters in "Oedipus Tyrannus": "Give me a glass of Maraschino punch." The association between cherries and drinking was such that in a long list of words meaning "stewed," H.L. Mencken includes the evocative "cherry-merry" in his The American Language: Supplement One. 
    Neither natural cherries or cherry liquor are the bright red cherries in sugar we think of today. Those arrived on our shores about 1900—cherries in alcohol to preserve their journey from Europe, and show up in headlines concerned with their healthfulness such as this, from 1907: “Maraschino Cherries Violate Pure Food Law.” 
    So that takes care of the cherries. I actually wrote an exegesis on grapefruits, which migrated from the Caribbean to Florida about 1830, and boomed along with the intercontinental express and Florida real estate in the early decades of the 20th century.
    "The grapefruit to-day the aristocrat of the breakfast table and one of Florida's most valuable products was once not so long ago was believed to be worthless except as medicine," Ida Donnelly Peters wrote in "Grapefruit at other meals" in the February 1914 Delineator, "and was allowed to become overripe on the trees,  fall to the ground and there blacken undisturbed," 
     She suggests serving grapefruit with oysters, or as part of puddings and gelatins. Maraschino cherries are there too, but merely included among the general fruit salads of nuts and other delicacies designed to go into grapefruit shells. Just eating the grapefruit, unaltered, does not seem to have been an option. 
     Maraschinos have a typical cameo in Janet M. Hill's article "Seasonable and Tested Recipes" from the July, 1915 issue of American Cookery. Her description of "Half Grapefruit for Luncheon or Dinner" starts out promisingly enough—"Cut grapefruit in halves, crosswise, to make two portions from one fruit"—but then, as far as I can tell, the chef removes the hemisphere of grapefruit pulp and, apparently discards it, filling the skin cup with "half-sections of orange or preserved peaches, plums, pears, cherries, or pineapple; or fill the space with grape juice, confectioner's sugar, bar-le-duc currants or a maraschino cherry." She doesn't explicitly instruct you to discard the grapefruit pulp itself, but it never goes back in the skin either.
     So we have maraschino cherries being mixed into grapefruit recipes—there was a lot of broiling of grapefruits going on. How did cherries get placed in the center of grapefruits? I couldn't find textual proof of the practice's origin, so I will have to stray into conjecture: they look good there, a cherry or something: some place halved strawberries in the center of the grapefruit, and those work as well. 
    I always thought of the cherries as a festive touch, and was pleased to see that attitude supported in a 1937 publication—the oldest reference to the practice I could find after minutes of research—called "Gleanings in Bee Culture" that first drizzles the cut grapefruit with honey, naturally, and the cherry added should the situation call for it.
    "If there are to be guests, or the meal is to be a particularly festive occasion, place a well-drained maraschino cherry in the center of each half grapefruit."
     Notice that "well-drained." Otherwise, the cherry would leave a mark when removed. That could cause problems. In their reflections on living in New York's famed Carlyle Hotel as girls in the 1950s, daughters of the manager, the real-life models for Kay Thompson's "Eloise," had strong memories of those maraschino cherries delivered by room service to guests, because they would steal them off trays in the hallways.
    "We got in so much trouble for that," Marilise Flusser told the New York Post. "[The staff] would say, 'Girls! That means the bellboy has to go all the way downstairs to replace the cherries because now there's a red stain [where the cherry should be] and we can't give that to the clients!'"
     Thus the decadence of serving yourself a maraschino cherry on your grapefruit when it is not a festive occasion or you are not a guest in a fancy hotel. My wife never joins me in my maraschino cherry orgy—she's sweet enough without it. But what is life if you can't indulge in a solitary spree? Besides, if I didn't use them to decorate my grapefruit halves, the cherries would be there forever. So I don't feel bad grabbing one to turn a half grapefruit into a 1950s extravaganza of elegance. At only 8 calories, it is luxury I can afford.