White whale and wide wall: American obsessives Ahab and Donald Trump

Ahab, illustrated by Rockwell Kent. "In the mid-20th century, he's an argument against totalitarianism," said Will Hansen, curator of the Herman Melville exhibit at The Newberry. "And now he's this demagogue leading us over the cliff."

     Even Ahab, the great figure of self-destructive obsession in American literature, gets pushback, immediately, while he’s still selling his quest to the doomed crew of the Pequod. He displays the ounce of Spanish gold belonging to whoever first sights the white whale and nails it to the mast. The crew cheers. But Starbuck, the young chief mate — and future eponym for a famous chain of coffee shops — isn’t huzzahing with the rest. He’s scowling.
     “What’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck,” Ahab demands. “Wilt thou not chase the white whale? Art not game for Moby Dick?”
     “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow,” replies Starbuck. “But I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.”
     It might be a stretch to compare Ahab and Donald Trump. One man is sun-bronzed and lean, the other orange-dyed and stout. But the two men do share a leadership style — both issuing “orders so sudden and peremptory.”
     And Ahab’s white whale does resonate with Trump’s wide wall. When Starbuck elaborates his objection, “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,” he is referring to the unreasoning whale.
     Echoed by the dumb thing of Trump’s wall, which is stupid because it is racist, unnecessary and expensive. Most Americans, like Starbuck, are clear-eyed enough to oppose such vengeful folly.
     Moby Dick is on my mind, having walked through the excellent “Melville: Finding America at Sea” with organizer Will Hansen, The Newberry Library’s director of reader services and curator of Americana.
     “The great American secular Bible,” he said, pausing before, “the first editions of Moby Dick, first published in London.”
     London?
     “It was fairly common in the 19th century for American writers to first publish in England, probably because America had no copyright protections,” Hansen said. "England was starting to get more copyright protections, thanks to Dickens, if you first published in England it was thought you had a better case to sue if somebody pirated your work."

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"It is a grape."

    I love, love, love going to the supermarket. Always have, back to the day when my mother and I would visit the two groceries that existed in our world, Pick & Pay or A & P. I was almost an adult before I discovered that you could buy food from a place that didn't have an ampersand in its name.
     Back then, the joy was just to hang with my mom and maybe score a black and white cookie at the Hough Bakery at the back of the supermarket. Now I like to study the products. Because you never know what you might find, like the orange box of Zante Currants on the right above. 
     If you grew up on the things, forgive me. But I had never heard of them, the unfamiliar product made even stranger by the oh-so-familiar Sun-Maid logo. It's like you saw an orange bottle of Heinz Mooshpa. A sauce of some kind,  apparently. 
     Of course I bought a box. "Tiny, tart and dark to taste," according to the Sun-Maid web page, which says they are made from the Corinth grape. I had heard the term "currant" before, usually describing something found in bakery items, a perception Sun-Maid validates, noting, "For many, they’ve become the preferred delicacy in healthy baked good recipes, like scones, cookies, breads, muffins and rolls."  
     But "Zante"? That is the true thrill: "A name of one of the Ionian islands, anciently Zacynthus," according to my Oxford English Dictionary. Used in the names of certain products. "Zante wine, wood, etc."
     The OED's first citation is from some business publication from 1615, but I knew I could do better, quickly stumbling upon a 1913 publication, compiled by Michael F. Tarpey, called "Levantine Grapes Commercially Known As Currents."      

    It quotes one Dr. Gustav Eisen, curator of the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and an expert on horticulture, who testified that he had "made the Zante current one of the objects of his researches and studies" and that the fruit can be found mentioned in English documents dating back to 1333, as there was "considerable trade carried on between the Venetians and the English in Northern Europe generally in a fruit that was known as the 'raisin of Corinth.'" 

     A modest publication of only 40 pages, "Levantine Grapes" nevertheless begins more boldly than many novels: 

     Every discussion of tariff brings up the "Zante currant" question.     The "Zante current," miscalled, is not a currant.     It is a grape. Currants grow on a bush. Grapes grow on vines. The misnamed "Zante currant" is in no sense analogous to the American currant. The misunderstanding arises from a corruption of its French name "Raisin de Corinthe," or Corinthian grape.

      The book was directed at Congress, its purpose, it stated ,was "convincing legislators and the people that this question should be understood and finally settled." Of course money was involved. "Levantine Grapes" worries that reduction in tariffs on Zante currents would pose "a severe, if not mortal, blow to an industry which, as yet wobbly upon its feet, promises to become a prime industry."

      They must have won their case: the flood of cheap Greek dried fruit must have been effectively deflected, as the Sun-Maid Zante currants were grown, not in Greece, but California. Honestly, I could plunge deeper into pre-World War I grape tariffs, but I have a sense it's time to wrap up.
      Before we leave our topic, I have to point out that the island has a cameo in The Iliad, no less, in Book 2, translated by Robert Fagles: 

Next Odysseus led his Cephallenian companies, gallant-hearted fighters, the island men of Ithaca, of Mount Neriton's leafy ridges shimmering in the wind, and men who lived in Corcylia and rugged Aegilips, men who held Zacynthus and men who dwelled near Samos...

     See why I love shopping? One second you are weighing grapefruit in your hand to see if it's juicy enough to merit buying. The next you catch the faintest echo of an early 20th century trade tussle then, better, a clank of bronze, a whiff of sea salt, carried across the globe and the ages by tiny grapes that might not have dried in the Ionian sun, but are the descendent of fruit that once did.   

The Saturday Snapshot #27

      I could go all Benjamin Franklin on you and ask whether you think the sun above is rising or setting, and then use that as a measure of optimism. (Franklin famously mused whether the sun on the back of George Washington's chair at the Constitutional convention was rising or setting; he thought it ascendant).  

     But Tom Peters sent this, calling it "Frigid Sunset." The sun can be mocking, when its so cold, though this photo doesn't really convey "cold" to me. I asked Tom to elaborate on it, and this is what he said:

It's a wetland just south of Deer Creek Golf Course in University Park on Old Monee Road just east of Western Ave. I have driven by it over the decades on my way to and from work at the post office and now the flower shop down in Beecher. It is a favorite stopping spot for migrating water fowl in the Spring & Fall and home to many geese, egrets and blue herons. I was fortunate enough to see an immature bald eagle fly over on one of my trips home from work, that made my day.

     Tom's right about eagles making your day. I haven't seen many—usually in the UP. 
     Franklin's bit about rising or falling, by the way, is a little trite. A person who sees a sunset is not, by definition, less optimistic than a person who sees a sun rise. He, or she, might be just looking farther ahead, to the challenges and rewards of the next day. Might be wishing an end to a particularly taxing day that has gone by. I know many an American is eager for our current historic period to wind up as soon as possible and bring something better to come. That is surely optimism. 

Jason Van Dyke’s sentence was fair — Kwame Raoul is wrong to challenge it

     Damn.
     Just when the Laquan McDonald case finally seemed to approach what they call “closure” in the tragedy biz, with former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke sentenced to 81 months in prison, meaning he’d serve three years and change for pumping 16 shots into the teenager on Oct. 20, 2014, along comes our new Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul, to kick over the can brimming with human heartache and ask the Illinois Supreme Court for a longer sentence.

     Damn. 
     And worse, from my perspective — self-referential perspective, sure, but what else is new? — is that now I have to write about it, having managed to studiously avoid the whole thing, mostly, mucking around with Roman philosophers and British dukes and whatever shiny trinket I can find to distract myself and maybe you.
     The whole story is just so grim. From 17-year-old McDonald staggering around Pulaski Avenue on a school night, clutching his 3-inch knife, to the first wave of cops somehow managing to keep their distance until Van Dyke races up, ponders the situation for a full six seconds, then empties his automatic into McDonald, to the gauzy veil of lies ritualistically tossed over the crime, reflexively, out of habit, not just by officers on the scene, but by the superintendent, the mayor and a shrugging City Council, which licked its thumb and peeled off $5 million of your tax money, handing it to McDonald’s family, who might not have been taking as careful care of the teen as you or I might, while he was alive, but who were scrupulous about keeping their yaps zipped until a journalist — no wonder everybody hates us — dragged the video into public view just in time for Christmas 2015.
     Sure, during the trial, as people agonized over the possibility of a police code of silence — could it possibly exist? — I thought of piping up, “Are you people insane?” The code of silence is the CPD, body and soul. But anyone who knows anything about Chicago already knows that, and I try not to traffic in the obvious.
     Damn.

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Mancow bites minister: radio host brings down Harvest Bible founder

Mancow Muller, left, being baptized
in the Jordan River by James
MacDonald (Photo courtesy of
Mancow Muller) 

      When disc jockeys and pastors clash, usually it is the radio personality who gets the worst of it, facing outraged listeners, fleeing advertisers and summary firings from nervous station management.
     But after the self-described "wild man of Chicago radio" Mancow Muller— since last month on WLS 890 AM — took issue with his former spiritual guide James MacDonald, founder of the Harvest Bible Chapel , it was the senior pastor of the mega-church who lost his job, officials of the 12,000 member church with seven locations in the Chicago area announced "with great sadness" Wednesday.
     MacDonald had said he was taking an "indefinite sabbatical from all preaching and leadership” in mid-January.
     “I am grieved that people I love have been hurt by me in ways they felt they could not express to me directly and have not been able to resolve,” he said in a statement.
     "I'm upset that I was duped by a con man," said Muller, who wrote a 2,200 word condemnation in the Daily Herald at the end of January against the man who baptized him in the River Jordan. He said how once MacDonald "taught me forgiveness, trust, being authentic and taking a stand for what's right," but that Muller later came to see "an environment of thievery, and a smarmy actor out front, a guy who ... was brutal to everyone he thought was subservient."
     On Tuesday, Muller referred to the largely conservative, largely Republican church as "the cult that's called Harvest" on his radio show, demanding it refund money to the faithful, and encouraged listeners to join a class action lawsuit that he said he was starting.
What has MacDonald actually done to cause him to be let go?

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And the greatest musical moment I’ve ever seen belongs to … Laurie Anderson

     I’ve seen a lot of great musicians perform.
     Bruce Springsteen, back-to-back with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, cooking to “Rosalita.” Annie Lennox, her carrot hair crewcut-short, keeping time with drumsticks over her head, singing in a bar in Cleveland. I’ve seen Leonard Bernstein conduct the Vienna Philharmonic and Muddy Waters sing the blues. I’ve seen Frank Zappa display his shambolic virtuosity, twice, and Yo-Yo Ma play cello so sublimely the audience cried. Or maybe that was just me. Once, at a party, Tony Bennett made a surprise appearance, stood within arm’s reach and sang, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” I’ve heard distinctive singers from Joe Cocker to Joe Strummer, of the Clash. I’ve seen Elton John pound the piano on “Bennie and the Jets” and Ray Charles caress it, singing “Georgia on my Mind.” I’ve listened to David Bowie noodle a synthesizer and heard Loretta Lynn warble “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” I’ve heard Dizzy Gillespie play the trumpet, warming up in his hotel room. Alone with me.
     So yeah, I’ve been around. But without question, the best musical moment I’ve ever seen was something performance artist Laurie Anderson did in Colorado in 1983, and since she’s doing a rare show Sunday in Chicago, I hope you don’t mind if I revisit the memory.
      I had become acquainted with her the year before, when “Big Science” came out. I remember seeing the album in the window of Vintage Vinyl in Evanston, and marching in to buy it, though I had never heard her music.
     Why? I’m abashed to say this — it feels creepish in 2019 — but I thought Laurie Anderson was a babe. The short spiky hair. The big white sunglasses. Cute as a button.
     In my defense, I was 21

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What is it about cars that makes us love them?

     This is my second piece from the special Chicago Car Show magazine that was included in Sunday's Sun-Times. 


     It was the sound.
     The growl of the 650 horsepower, supercharged V8 engine of the Corvette Z06 as I mashed the gas pedal, sinking into the red leather seat. All that power. From zero to 60 in under three seconds. The roar seemed to reach into my skin, grab my bones, and shake them.
     Of course, this being the 21st century, even that howl of raw power is actually under fine-tuned control. A few taps and the “Engine Sound Management” screen pops up, offering four modes, “Stealth,” “Tour,” “Sport” and “Track.”
     “Stealth is for when you are on long highway trips, and get tired of the noise,” said George Kiebala, owner of Curvy Road, an exotic sports car time share in Palatine. If you want the joy of driving that Corvette super car, without having to actually buy one, Curvy Road allows you access for a fraction of the cost.
     And why would anybody want to do that? Why spend $1,000 to drive a car that can go three times the legal limit for a few days?
     Maybe that is best answered by what Louis Armstrong supposedly said when somebody asked him to explain jazz: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
     That said, let’s try.

                                                              • • •

     What is it about cars that makes us love them?
     Being American, no doubt. Love of cars is in our blood, our birthright, with our wide open expanse of roads, the last remnant of the Western frontier. Our literature is filled with classic tales of setting out on the road in cars: Jack Keroac’s “On the Road” to Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Not to mention all those songs, “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “Thunder Road” and “Little Red Corvette.” Americans are born loving cars.
     Do you believe that? Don’t. Americans were taught to love cars.
     At the beginning of the 20th century, when automobiles were introduced, and were viewed with collective horror as too fast — pushing speeds of 15 miles an hour! — and too dangerous. At mid-century, as highways began to blast through neighborhoods and the public resisted. The phrase “America’s love affair with the automobile” was coined in a 1961 TV program, “Merrily We Roll Along,” on the DuPont Show of the Week (DuPont owned a quarter of General Motors) hosted by Groucho Marx, of all people. He woodenly walks out at the beginning, leading a horse in one hand, holding a cigar in the other, and starts talking about “that great American romance between a man and his car.”
     He’s got the “man” part right. Thinking over a lifetime of car commercials — all those sleek sedans smoothly gliding over glistening roads, sprays of autumnal leaves flying everywhere — and trying to pinpoint even one that stood out, the only ad that comes to mind is one from the 1970s for the Triumph Spitfire. Even then it might be more for the fighter plane than the car.
     “You not only get a car and a girl, but a piece of history,” the narrator promises.
     Which brings up the very real possibility that love of cars is a guy thing. Being a guy myself, and therefore biased, I consulted someone who wasn’t, putting the question to one of the cleverest women I know, Molly Jong-Fast, New York novelist and Twitter wit (as well as daughter of best-selling author Erica Jong).
     Love of cars, I asked, a guy thing, right?
     “Definitely,” she said. “Definitely a guy thing.”
     Why?
     “I can’t speak for the whole gender, but [loving cars] seems really dumb to me, and most women think it’s really dumb” she continued. “It doesn’t even make any sense. Men get something out of cars that is completely lost on me. I like driving just fine. … it seems , it doesn’t even make any sense, why you would you care?”
     Why do men care? As teenagers, cars represented freedom — freedom to sneak off somewhere with a girl. Besides cars offering logistical support for romance, men seem to believe that fancy cars impress women. Though looking at my own life, that hasn’t been the case.
     My wife was always maddeningly unimpressed with cars. In my mid-20s, Chevrolet let me use a brand new Corvette for a week. Midnight blue. I didn’t tell my then-girlfriend, merely showed up with it. She got in the car and started talking about her day. I looked at her, jaw hanging.
     “What?” she said, picking up on my expression.
     “THE CAR!!!!” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you notice THE CAR?!?!”
     “Oh this,” she said, looking around, as if noticing it for the first time. “You know I don’t care for this kind of thing.”
     I married her anyway.
     Jong-Fast said that men like expensive cars, not to impress women, but to impress other men.
     “You definitely see it in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s a status thing. It’s one of those things men do for other men. Funny, because women are accused of dressing for other women, for being thin for other women. Cars are proof that men are concerned with what other men think of them.”

Neil Steinberg with the 2015 BMW i8 

     There has to be more to it than that. Cars have personalities, like people, and exotic cars are loved for their quirks as much, if not more, than their speed. I drove a 2015 BMW i8 and was most taken, not with the obviously impressive stuff — its gull wing doors — but its little quirks.     

     Such as? The hood. It’s sealed. It doesn’t open. At least, it can’t be opened by civilians, who have no business poking around in the electric motor underneath. If you want the hood opened, take it to a BMW dealer, who knows what he’s doing. I love that.

                                                                            • • •

     I’ve been talking about other men’s cars. To me, car love is reflected in a man’s first car — heck, I’m sure some women love their first cars too. My first car was utterly impractical, purchased for entirely psychological reasons. I was 22, and living alone in Los Angeles, working a job I despised. I looked at exactly one car: a 1963 Volvo P1800, white. It was my dream car; I needed the boost.
     In some ways, the car was a disaster. It had a rebuilt engine from another car. Constant repairs. But it looked fantastic — it’s the car Simon Templar drives in “The Saint.” I once got a date at a four-way stop sign with a young woman in a convertible Mustang who shouted, “What is that?”

With the P1800. Barrington, 1984.

   I owned the car for about three years. Eventually, repairs started to get to me — the radiator started leaking, and with 1963 Volvo P1800 radiators hard to find outside of Sweden, the dealer built a new one, at the cost of a week’s salary. Eventually I had to sell it. When the new owner drove it away, I cried.
     Not to end on a downer note. Those who think that the advent of self-driving cars, not to forget Uber and the prospect of silently rolling cubes delivering riders from Point A to Point B will cool the passion that many have for automobiles are mistaken. It’ll just adapt, like all long-term relationships.
     “I love my Chevy Bolt and I’d almost rather drive it than any Ferrari,” said Curvy Road’s George Kiebala, insisting I take her for a spin. It was like driving a video game. “This whole amazing transition: electrification and how its working its way into he super car world.”
     So love of cars isn’t going away?
     “Oh no, oh my goodness no,” he said. “Definitely the opposite.”

Corvette Z06