Sorry Elon, the rich-guy-blathering-idiocy-on-Twitter role is already filled

    It didn't start with Donald Trump you know.
    American history is rife with rich nutters leaping onto the political stage with a cry of "Death to tyrants." 
    While Trump has without question been most successful in injecting his execrable self into the news of the day, others certainly jammed their hands into the gears of history, where they could.
     The one that immediately springs to mind is Henry Ford. Before he got into the business of fomenting anti-Semitism and promoting square dancing as a way to preserve American values, not to forget being a real and direct personal inspiration to Hitler, Ford decided he was going to end World War I, commissioning a "Peace Ship" and accomplishing pretty much nothing except draw derision on himself.
      More recently, Texas oddball H. Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, briefly, before running away from it, vigorously, crying all the while, if I recall, that shady forces were spying on his daughter's wedding.
     Twitter makes it easier than ever for wealthy with more opinions than sense to make themselves known. Elon Musk, who really should be digging that rich folks underground railroad he promised Chicago almost two years ago, instead on Wednesday was tweeting his heart out for, the virus be damned, Americans to get back to work, one assumes in his factories.
    "FREE AMERICA NOW" he tweeted. "Give people their freedom back."
    Nor was his rejection of the idea of civil society acting to save lives limited to the free-fire zone of Twitter. On a Tesla earnings call he referred to stay-at-home orders as "fascist," akin to "forcibly imprisoning people in their homes."
     It's almost like he's auditioning for the Donald Trump role in American politics. Alas, that is already taken. We've got one too many as it is.
     I suppose this is an improvement over his tweets in March, such as “The coronavirus panic is dumb.”
      The moral of the story being: there are a lot of energetically idiotic people in the world.  And being very, very good at one thing — making cars, stirring the pot on third rate reality TV shows — doesn't mean you have a facility for accomplishing anything in another realm of life. Which leads to a not-very-cheery thought for this rainy Thursday in our Plague Year of 2020. But one whatever decent Americans remain ought to bear in mind. Getting rid of Trump will definitely be a start, but certainly will not end our problems. There's always another puffed up potentate, weaned on cash and yes men, clamoring for attention. 

     

Clip and save! Your COVID-19 crisis glossary

     Every prolonged crisis creates its own vocabulary. A special set of new words that linger. World War II (which lasted five years longer than the current crisis, so quit yer griping) is 75 years in the past. But many can reel off the terms it gave us: atom bomb, bazooka, commando, D-Day. And that’s just A-B-C-D.
     So what are the words our grandchildren will use regarding the current calamity? No doubt it will be covered in their “C29: Early 21st Century America, Decline and Disaster” class. A primer:

Coronavirus (kə-ˈrō-nə-ˌvī-rəs) n. Single-strand RNA virus studded with knobby projections (corona is Latin for crown). There are many coronaviruses — MERS, SARS, etc. — so the one causing trouble now was at first called the “new” or “novel” coronavirus, prefixes now typically dropped as superfluous. Usage: “More than a month since he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about this once-in-a-generation crisis.” — The Atlantic
COVID-19 (koh-vid naine-TEEN) n. Abbr. of “Coronavirus disease 2019,” the illness caused by a strain of coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Some news outlets, such as the New York Times, use lowercase (“Covid-19”), but that looks like the name of a South Korean boy band. Usage: “Rupert Murdoch, Fox News’ Covid-19 misinformation is a danger to public health.” — The Guardian
Covidiot (koh-vid-ee-et) n. The Urban Dictionary defines this as “someone who ignores the warnings regarding public health or safety.” Also used to describe someone hoarding goods, selfishly denying them to others. Usage: “Q: What do you call an armed member of a radical group of lockdown protestors? A: A Branch Covidiot.” — George Takei

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Time to count the pollen

In the Laboratory, by Henry Alexander (Met)

     "Allergies are bad this year," said a friend who stopped by Sunday for a social distance walk, trying to set us at ease at his sneeze, so we wouldn't worry that microscopic death was vigorously swimming in our direction through the six feet of air between us.

    The next day, Facebook reminded me that, nine years earlier, my status was "Neil Steinberg is showered, dressed and brewing the coffee at 3:45 a.m., heading over to watch them take the midwest pollen readings. The things that excite me..."

     There are several directions I could go with this. It reminds us of the head work and devotion to science that is so casually slurred by lazy idiots when the results go contrary to their stream of inner psychobabble. It also hints at the countless fascinating stories ignored in the general disaster of the pandemic. We could note that Gottlieb Hospital was funded by nickels and dimes scraped together by David Gottlieb, who began his famous pinball machine design and manufacturing company in Chicago in 1927. Or that Dr. Leija is still going strong at 90, though I am told he retired last year.

     It's 5:25 a.m., time for Dr. Joseph G. Leija to count the pollen and mold that Chicago has been breathing for the last 24 hours.
     He takes a white plastic-foam container holding glass microscope slides, selects one etched with tomorrow's date and greased to make it sticky. The allergist tucks the slide in a small plastic case and stands up.
     "I have to phone the guard," says Dr. Leija, who left his home in Oak Brook about 4:40 a.m. He calls security at Gottlieb Memorial Hospital and says the door to the roof will be opening—nothing to worry about, it's just him, as it has been every weekday morning for the last 20 years, in his capacity as head of the National Allergy Bureau's Melrose Park station, the only location monitoring airborne allergens in the state of Illinois, the only one between St. Louis and Madison.
     It's a little ironic that Dr. Leija ended up an allergist. Originally, he was a general practitioner who suspected that allergies were "psychosomatic," he says, twisting a finger at his temple. No more.
     Now, at 81, he still sees patients, but is not paid for his daily rooftop visit.
     "I'm doing this for fun," he says, his light accent hinting at Mexico. "My wife thinks I'm stupid. But people really need this."
     He walks through the empty hospital corridors, takes the elevator to the sixth floor, unlocks a security door, climbs stairs and steps out onto the hospital roof. Looking toward the city, the pre-dawn sky is brownish pink. The air is cool and pleasant. In the fall, when it's dark, he wears a miner's head lamp.
     On the southeast corner of the roof is a $5,000 device called a Burkard Volumetric Spore Trap, developed during World War II by the British, worried about biological attacks and seeking a way to detect any toxins that might puff across the English Channel.
     In the base of the trap is a fan, drawing air at 10 liters a minute—the rate a person breathes—and a mechanism that slowly moves the slide past an intake, plus a vane-like tail to make sure it faces into the wind so gusts don't rip the device off the roof.
     Dr. Leija opens the trap, removes yesterday's slide, tucks it in the little case and puts the fresh slide in its place. Then he takes a key and winds the mechanism that slowly moves a section of the slide past the intake.
     "We wind the clock," he says.
     He crunches across the rooftop stones, to the door and goes downstairs to his office.
     Why do this so early? Perhaps to minimize soot from daytime traffic emissions? No.
     "Because of the television cameras," he says. "They want it early in the morning, by 7 o'clock. Advertising the hospital."
     "They" refers to Tracy Butler, a meteorologist at Channel 7, who gives the pollen count twice a morning, at 7:30 and after 11.
     "It's so nice to have somebody like Dr. Leija, who cares so much about the accuracy of this count," Butler said later. "The man is on the roof no matter the weather, getting this data for our viewers, and he does it voluntarily. It says a lot about his mission."
     Going on the roof isn't the half of it. Back in his office, Dr. Leija stains the slide with red glycerin, then puts it under a microscope. First the pollen, at 400x magnification. Pollen is— to be blunt—a male plant's sperm. He doesn't just count the spores.
     "You have to identify them," he says. Some pollen are round, or blunted triangles, some have "Mickey Mouse ears." Acer, betulace, fraxinus, populus—sugar maple, birch, ash, cottonwood—for a count of 134.
     "I'm surprised there's so much pollen, with the rain," he says. "Cottonwood is flowering right now. A few weeks back it was elm." When the wind blows from the south, Dr. Leija finds juniper pollen from Texas.
     "For me, it's fascinating," he says.
     Then to 1,000x magnification, for the molds. Ascospores, cladosporium, rusts, smuts, chaetomium. They look like coffee beans under the microscope.
     "There are so many molds," he says.
     The counting takes nearly an hour. "You can get lost in the microscope," says Karen Cantalupo, a nurse who helps Dr. Leija with the count. "Either you like it or you don't."
     The stats are entered online; not the actual numbers, to prevent drug companies from swiping the data, but vague terms. Today's pollen and mold levels are "high." Cantalupo calls Channel 7 and Gottlieb PR, which also disseminates the information. "Marketing, marketing, marketing," says Dr. Leija.
     With allergies, both airborne and food, skyrocketing, and in an era of big medicine and big money, the pollen count is still monitored by a nationwide chain of volunteers.
     "Allergists are doing this count for nothing," says Dr. Estelle Levetin, a professor of biology at the University of Tulsa and chair of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology's Aerobiology Committee, which oversees the network. "But it's also giving them information that's going to help them with their patients. I think they all should be doing this."
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 4, 2011 Wednesday

"So these two viruses walk into a store..."

"The Laughing Audience" by William Hogarth (Met)

     As a rule, I don't criticize other parts of the paper. But it wasn't my colleagues writing the jokes featured Sunday. And besides, my job, as I see it, sometimes involves pointing out an awkward truth. 

    The hard part about 9/11 for me — and I have to emphasize the for me part, because for other people the hard part was burning to death in a pool of jet fuel — was that nothing was funny anymore.
     There was no ironic distance. No sense of relief, no minor mastery over circumstances that comes with finding humor in a situation.
     It was all sincerity — George W. Bush-level sincerity, the really strong stuff, 151 proof sincerity. We were defenseless, carried along by the torrent of history without the stout paddle that a solid sense of humor gives a person.
     For about a week.
     And then, I was watching TV news — that great font of unintentional comedy — which introduced a segment with a logo. You know: flickering candle, weepy soundtrack. I looked at the screen and thought, “I’m sorry all those people are dead ... but if I have to hear ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ one more time, I’m going to puke.”
     And with that, normality — my normality anyway — whirred to life, like a computer rebooting. Blank screen then, zing, back in business again.
     So it was with admiration and interest that I approached our Sunday front-page feature, “WE COULD ALL USE A GOOD LAUGH ABOUT NOW.” The Sun-Times dragooned 10 Chicago-area comics to share their COVID-19 jokes with our readers.

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The Pampered Idiot

"Mars—His Idiot" by Kerr Eby (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong," Sherwood Anderson writes of one character in Winesburg, Ohio. "He could master others, but he couldn't master himself."

     That sentence begs to be picked apart. "In these later times" might sneak past, at first, but it is a reminder that the times always feel late; the present, the crust of history yet forming, only now begun to cool. We've always missed the gold age. The time feels late, at least to those no longer young. 

"The Pampered Idiot" by Leonardo Alenza Nieto (Met)

      The "thousand other strong men"—don't they immediately spring to mind? Can't you just see them, in a group? Tough guys, a dime a dozen. Pumped to hide the hollowness within. Makes you think about all those guys parading around state capitals, holding signs, their protests demanding that they be asked to make no sacrifice, no matter how small, toward the country they profess to love. "I need a haircut!" Has any more pathetic plaint been made in the history of this country? No disruption of routine, no gesture made toward civic responsibility, not when they can display the firearms that are a far greater threat to their own lives, to the health and safety of themselves and their families than to any bad guys skulking around their nightmares. Strong on the surface, but oh so weak underneath. Not even "half strong." 

     The president certainly is at full half strength, and nearly named by that "couldn't master himself." As identifying as a thumbprint. As a mug shot. Not that he seems to try, self-mastery being an alien concept to him, to all of them.  Why even try try to control yourself when you can enjoy the fun of pretending you have control over others?
     You hear the term "babbling idiot" from time to time. But how often do you actually see one? Actually see an idiot, babbling? There's almost a rare kind of pleasure to it, the cliche in real life. Like being in a crowded Grand Central Station. "What is this?" you pause to say, smiling, "Grand Central Station?"

      Or there would be, if it weren't so serious. If the serious result weren't seen all around us all the time. Well, seen by some of us anyway. The others, not so much.

Texas notes: Keep your distance

  

"Night in Bologne," by Pat Cadmus (Smithsonian)

     This is the third installment of a series of weekly reports that reader Caren Jeskey has been sending from Austin, Texas. You can find last week's installment here and the first post here. Her title is "Keep your distance," and I stuck "Texas Notes" before it because I thought, by always including "Texas" in the title, it'll signal the change in voice to readers. And besides, when she wants to gather them together, say after some big New York publisher wants to publish them in a book, having "Texas" in all the headlines will make that easier.

     On a sunny seventy degree day in early Spring of 2002 my coworker Kim and I decided to take a walk along the lakefront during our lunch break from our South Loop office building. 

     As we approached a grassy knoll we noticed a circle of bike cops surrounding two young men on the sidewalk nearby. Two sturdy bicycles were propped up on their kickstands in the grass, bags and boxes strewn around, and cops were apparently searching the contents. 

      One of the cops surrounding the men on the sidewalk was a red faced stocky woman with ruddy cheeks that were bright crimson and sweaty, reflecting the intensity of the moment. The first words that popped into my head were racial profiling. People had been suspicious of each other since the 9/11 attacks and it was clear that we were watching a reaction to that suspicion as it was unfolding. 

      My next thought was that the men looked like spiritual pilgrims. One was tall with dark black hair that hadn’t had a cut in ages, and a bushy unkempt beard. He was wearing loose fitting cotton Dickies style pants rolled up mid-calf, a wrinkled white button up shirt and simple gym shoes. He face was drawn and he looked tired and resigned. The other pilgrim was fair skinned with a touch of sunburn, long unkempt ginger colored hair and a full unruly beard. He also had long sideburns framing his worried, flushed, pinched face.
     As we passed I wanted to stop to see what was happening and my impulse was to try to help if I could. Kim sharply said “keep walking. Let’s go.” This snapped me out of my samaritan spirit and back into the reality that these were very tense and potentially dangerous times. A circle of angry faced bike cops searching two hapless young men was a scene best avoided. We kept walking, and processed our sadness about the state of the world as well as our helplessness to prevent harassment of innocent people.
     We walked up the paved sloping path towards the Shedd Aquarium and circled it, peering into the huge blue green windows of the Oceanarium filled with dolphins and whales. We looped our way back to the sidewalk moving north along the lakefront. As we made our way back towards the knoll the cops were gone. The ginger cyclist was sitting on the concrete curb, chin resting heavily in his hands, face heavy and sad. The dark haired young man was calmly placing his bags and boxes back onto the racks of his bicycle that was still propped up in the grass. I said to Ginger “are you ok?” He looked at me blankly for a moment, and then snapped “what?” in a loud and defensive tone. I said “I just wanted to know if you are ok. We saw the cops searching you.” He seemed to snap back to reality and said “oh, wow. Thanks. Yeah, that was really scary but we are ok.” I said “good,” and Kim and I continued our walk back towards the office.
     We were several hundred yards away when Ginger biked up to us calling “hey!” 

      I felt a little worried since we had to get back to work and I didn’t want to get overly involved with this disheveled young man and what looked like a complicated situation. Kim and I stopped and he quickly pressed out the words “I just wanted to say thank you so much for asking me how I was doing. We haven’t done anything wrong and got stopped and searched for no reason. It was really scary.” 

      I said “I am so glad we stopped and that you are ok. We have to get back to work now.” Kim was already walking away and I turned to join her. 

      “Wait!” he said. “Caren, I know you.” 

      This got our attention and Kim and I both turned back to him. My heart started racing, it felt so uncanny. “It’s me, Tim, from Second Street!” This was one of those moments of synchronicity that Carl Jung describes as “an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” This was Tim, the best friend of the bartender at the bar I worked at in Santa Monica about six years earlier. Back then I felt that I was much older than Tim and the bartender Anthony—after all I was 25 and they were only 21 or so. When Tim would invite me to join them on their camping trips to the desert or the ocean I’d laugh and say “thank you,” but never did take him up on these invitations. I always thought Tim was super sweet but way too young for me to consider hanging out with. In retrospect he would have been a lot more fun to hang out with than the bar’s karaoke-night MC I fell for, not knowing he was married and cheating on his wife with me.
     Tim, Anthony and their friends were fun and full of life. They were adventurous and warm. This adventurous spirit had led Tim to the Chicago lakefront on this day. He explained that he and his friend had biked to Chicago from California and were making their way to the Atlantic Ocean, a coast to coast bike trip. This trip had brought him to the lakefront spot at the same time Kim and I passed the same spot, and something inside prompted me to reach out to what seemed like a distressed person in need of solace and that person just happened to be Tim, several years and thousands of miles later. It made me feel a deep connection to life itself. We chatted a little bit more and said goodbye. The moment was rich enough itself that we did not feel the need to turn it into something else.
     In this coronavirus social distancing Spring of 2020 we once again feel a fear of the people around us. This time the danger seems even more imminent and real. Back in 2002, I had the distinct sense that I did not have to fear every dark haired stranger, and I did not have to fear men with beards even though many of my fellow Americans did. I knew that the bad guys were few and far between and did not think to avoid or run from people I passed on the street. Today is different. When the man biked past me sneezing and coughing tonight as I took an evening walk I wanted to run to the sidewalk and away from the potentially virus-ridden droplets heading in my direction. When a neighbor and I took a safely distanced walk I felt that there was an invisible 6’ yard stick between us and we negotiated this necessary distance as though we were magnets bouncing off of each other, as if we’d been doing this dance forever. When a man jogged right past me and nearly brushed my shoulder with his on the sidewalk the other day I ran into the front lawn of a house, and the man turned around and yelled “oh my God!” as though I had done something wrong by creating responsible space between us.
     I’d be mad at him if I didn’t also feel that this whole thing is incredibly sad, difficult and confusing at times. Even sadder is the knowledge that we have no idea how much longer we will have to beeline away from each other with this very real and not imagined threat to ourselves and those we love as this virus runs its course. It’s not beards and fezes, hijabs and such that we fear anymore, it’s everyone. In 1955 Carl Jung wrote this: I am no preacher of “splendid isolation” and have the greatest difficulty in shielding myself from the crushing demands of people and human relationships. This time in history calls for us to keep up with the demands of human relationships in the truest and deepest way possible, in fact to save each others’ lives.

Day 19,432 of the lockdown: Kidding, it only feels that way

Boulder, Colorado

     My mother and I talk on the phone every day. It seems the least I can do. Boulder, Colorado, which offered so much when my parents retired there, geez, more than 30 years ago, isn’t quite the jubilee it once was. Now in their mid-80s, they aren’t charging up the trail to Wonderland Lake anymore.
     It can be a frustrating conversation. Particularly when my mother is planning to go to the store. “Ma!” I’ll say. “Don’t risk your life for coconut shrimp!” Or, when that doesn’t work, “Ma! You’re going to die alone, surrounded by strangers in masks.”
     My father is sometimes watching television when I phone — CNN, thank God, not Fox — and my mother will mention something on the screen, the latest aftershock from our president’s daily twirl in the limelight, like some demented ballerina on the music box in an insecure girl’s nightmare.
     “Don’t watch TV news, Mom,” I’ll say. “I never do.”
     That’s true. Primarily because I read four newspapers and follow events online, so anything on TV is repetitive. Even big breaking stories — the last time I fled to TV news was when Notre Dame burned. After 10 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing, watching the same static shot, I bailed. What’s the point? As for the president’s daily 5 p.m. nervous breakdown, “Fortunate the person,” Soren Kierkegaard writes in his journal, “who did not need to travel to hell in order to see what the devil looks like.”
     People who do make that journey, the daily descent, feel obligated to react. This has gone on years, and I’m sorry, but by now those doing so seem merely slow on the uptake. “What? You’re saying that the president is lying?!? Oh, my gosh, that’s awful! When did he start doing that?”
     And yet. Sometimes, you must join in. State the obvious. For The Record. Yes, there is something OCD about keeping track of the president’s lies. Maybe it’s like baseball; to ignore even one wild pitch is to lose the fabric of the game. To abandon history. I understand that. Was that a strike or a ball? Hard to determine the next day. You have to pay attention now. Though I bet journalists wish they had decided to keep track of his true statements — a much shorter list.
     To the matter at hand.
     On Monday, he — no need to speak the name, we all know who I'm talking about — tweeted this:
     “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens. I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

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