We can’t fly; we can’t hug; at least let us grin

     This grew surprisingly unpleasant. Someone at the paper saw a story Thursday about this COVID-shaped snack, and asked if I would weigh in. I had just finished my Friday column but, stout soldier that I am, I happily cobbled  together what I thought was a light take. The central challenge was getting the photo at right from Alinea, since being a newspaper, we couldn't just pluck the art off Instagram the way a web site could. 
     Friday, the guy originally complaining about this cursed canapé then wrote to complain some more about how his complaints were mishandled. 
     I tried to be charming and soothing, but the more I tried, the uglier the conversation grew. So into the filter he went. I considered posting the exchange here, but honestly, it was just depressing, all this angst about an amuse-bouche.
     Then the folks at the local news site which broke the story picked up the complaint itch, complaining on Twitter that I had shat on their news gathering skills with my less-than-reverent reference to their reportage. The shock of it—I thought I was giving them a grinning shout-out—must have stunned me senseless, because I defended myself on Twitter, alway a mistake. I felt like a mastodon stuck in a tar pit, attacked by raptors.
    So I blocked all involved, vented to a few actual friends in the living world, was soothed by their response, so rare on social media: human kindness. Then I moved on, which is one of my superpowers.  

     When my boss asked me to gather thoughts on Alinea’s new novel coronavirus-shaped canapé, conscientious newsman that I am, I suggested heading over right away to try the tidbit. To comment intelligently, I had to first sample the purplish sphere of coconut custard with Szechuan peppercorn, dotted with freeze-dried raspberries that caused some on Instagram to grouse that lives lost to COVID-19 are being mocked by a confection.
     Shoe-leather reporting. Direct experience. Can’t beat it.
     Alas, time is of the essence. So all I could do is acquaint myself with the thorough treatment by Block Club Chicago, which sadly chose to quote one, count ’em, one disgruntled person by name, complaining on Instagram. “This isn’t ok ... this isn’t ‘cute.’ This is shameful,” wrote the irked individual, whose identity we’ve decided to shield, out of an excess of kindness.
     No, what’s shameful is Donald Trump insisting America’s schools reopen in the fall, pandemic be damned. As are the same people who are willing to sacrifice Grandma to stay behind him now tossing Junior onto the pyre as well. Our nation marinates in humiliation like Hawaiian chicken.
     This is ... well, wry. Artsy. Maybe a little decadent. Much like Alinea itself, though I hasten to note that the custard with the controversial shape was not served at Grant Achatz’s 3-Michelin star Lincoln Park shrine, but at AIR — Alinea in Residence — a West Loop rooftop pop-up. It’s offered after prospective diners have had their temperature checked and are given a mask: if anything, the treat is a commentary on where we are at this awkward moment.

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Texas notes: Karen

    The latest report from Caren Jeskey, EGD's Austin Bureau Chief.

     "Marsha Marsha Marsha!" You may recall these three words yelled by Jan Brady when she felt that her taller, prettier older sister came out ahead and Jan, the middle child, was left in the shadows. 

      Today the Urban Dictionary defines this phrase as “a whiny dramatic response by someone who is jealous of another person.” 

     Enter Karen stage right, originally typecast in social media as a whiny, overbearing, entitled white lady behaving very badly by acting in an entitled, unreasonably controlling manner: “Get me the manager! My soup is lukewarm!” “I am NOT tipping you! You don’t deserve it even if you crawled to work today!” “Tsk tsk tsk! You are NOT in your place in line, now get back there.” 

     They don’t have an off-switch for their lack of ability to read a room and realize that the world does not revolve around them. Karens seem to take great pleasure in micromanaging the world to suit their version of how things should be. Karen has now morphed into the word used to describe anyone leaning on their privilege and calling the police on or falsely accusing non-white people of imagined bad behavior.
     For example, there is the intrusive white lady in the exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco threatening to call the police last week on a non-white man. James Juanillo was stenciling the words Black Lives Matter in chalk on his own property when Lisa Alexander and her husband Robert Larkins walked by and decided Mr. Juanillo was up to no-good. Not only did she assume he was creating an act of vandalism, she lied to him and said she knew the “true” owner of the property, even though he’d been the homeowner for nearly 20 years. This woman lost a big contract for her skin care line, and Mr. Larkins, the male Karen with her, lost his job at Raymond James according to several news reports.
     If this makes you uncomfortable it should. Non-white people are harassed constantly in the land of the free, and have been since their tenure on this land. I wrote a bit about it in my EGD post Searched a few weeks back. I'm thrilled that these incidents are now recorded for all to see, and can no longer be denied. 

     “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Dr Martin Luther King Jr

     I've been taught to call out racist behavior in real-time every time, and am starting to feel safer to do so. I wish I’d recorded these: a few years ago while working at a hospital in Texas a nurse told me that “black people need to get over slavery! That was 400 years ago,” when I provided an impoverished black man with a bus pass. As a hospital social worker it was my job to create safe and expedient discharges. That $2.50 bus pass may have saved the hospital thousands of dollars that would have been spent if this patient had no way to get home and had to spend another night or two. The nurse saw it as me enabling a black person to milk the system.
     A colleague once told me that he calls his pastor “Pastor Black, because he's from Africa. Get it?”
     A doctor in a rural hospital confronted me on an elevator where I was trapped with him and a high-level nurse: “oh look it’s Caren the socialist worker.” They laughed at me. “Hey dumb ass. Getting these patients you hate and disrespect out of here is my job. Would you rather cough up ten thousand dollars out of your inflated pocketbook to put them up another few nights in the hospital? Didn’t think so. How about thanking me for my diligent efforts to plan a safe discharge?” I said. Well OK, I did not say anything. The nurse, however, took it as a chance to jump into the harassment. “Caren you know what we should do with all of those [non-white non-English speaking homeless traumatized sometimes veterans of our great country] patients you help? Put them on an island somewhere so they can stop taking advantage of you. Then you can focus on [white] patients who deserve your time. “Thanks Karens, good talk,” I imagined myself saying as I pressed myself against the elevator doors, frantically pressing the button for the next possible stop and way out of this clown parade.
     I first started hearing people say “don’t be such a Karen” before Karen became the descriptor for the embodiment of white privilege she is today. Prior to a few weeks ago, the meme was simply unpleasant background noise. I’d cringe a little when someone asked me my name, since I knew what they might think when I said it. I live in a young town and many people I came across in my daily travels would stifle a laugh or even laugh aloud when they’d hear me admit I was, in fact, a real live Karen.
     In a moment of feeling sorry for myself, I posted on Facebook that some Karens out there feel bullied and teased by the use of the meme. Friends responded with acronyms for my name “Caring, Altruistic, Rad, Excellent, Neighborly,” and sentiments such as “you are the anti-Karen.” What I found more interesting was the friend who said “don’t take it personally,” and pointed out how effective this one word has become for naming very bad behavior and waking us up. I realized that by taking it personally I was closing my mind to learning about why it has taken such hold. The Karen meme is not going anywhere and will affect me for years to come. You can’t fight popular culture any more than you can fight city hall, so I decided to dig deeply into what being a Karen means, and why it’s important for us to take a look, and seek to understand.
     Thankfully I have never been a cop-calling against non-white people Karen, but I have been a let-me-talk-to-the-manager type. I am now seeing how tiring that is and I want to cut it out. I have so much to be grateful for and will be happier when I can let go of perfectionist tendencies and be more flexible— to enjoy life more and be a better member of a tough society rather than one who makes things more difficult.
     Here is where it got really exciting for me this week. A friend posted this on my Facebook page: The "CAREN Act" (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) was introduced on Tuesday at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting by Supervisor Shamann Walton.  This ordinance would make calls to 911 that are deemed to be discriminatory and racially biased illegal and the offender, if found guilty, would face fines, sensitivity training, and even possibly jail time. There is already a bill in California, AB-1550, that prohibits “Discriminatory Emergency Calls,” but the CAREN Act has been getting more attention this past week.
     The friend who pointed out this act suggested that "Carens with C should call the cops on Karens with K for calling the cops on non-white folks. I love it.” I love it too.
  

Duckworth may even grow into the VP job

Joe Biden has promised to select a woman as his VP.

      Aw, gee...
     My problem is, I wait too long. Waste time thinking. Mulling ramifications. Meanwhile, the just-say-stuff crowd thunders past.
     When whispers started that U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth is being considered as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate, I tried to shake it off as her own camp floating her name. Politicians do that.
     When it became clear she is actually on the short list, my reaction was to drag my hand over my face, groan and say, “Aw, gee...”
     Because Duckworth — while unquestionably a war hero who lost both legs in 2004 when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq — was also, again without question, a lackluster Illinois Veterans Administration head who had trouble accomplishing anything. Then a meh Illinois congresswoman. And finally, since 2017, a so-so senator.
     The fault might not be hers. Maybe there’s something wrong with the seat she’s in. Maybe it’s cursed: four of her five predecessors were Mark Kirk, Roland Burris, Peter Fitzgerald and Carol Moseley Braun, a rogue’s gallery of mediocrity if ever there were (the fifth, and exception to the rule, Barack Obama, didn’t have his butt in a Senate chair long enough to leave an impression).
     I was sharpening my pencils and arranging them in a nice straight row, maybe a little reluctant, because Duckworth seems a genuinely nice person, and you hate so say something unkind about a genuinely nice person. Then suddenly a disgusting sound, like a manatee vomiting: Fox’s Tucker Carlson spewing forth several venomous diatribes against Duckworth. The stench wafted across Twitter. I felt duty-bound to take a look.

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Hello Dolly

     Not every column works. The more I dug into Big Boy restaurants swapping out their iconic Big Boy for Dolly, a minor character in the Big Boy Saga, the more it seemed an IHOP-like scam (which pretended to change its name to IHOb, International House of Burgers, for a month) designed to plug their chicken sandwich. And besides, there is no single Big Boy chain, but a balkanized group, including realms such as Frisch's Big Boy, which isn't involved in the ploy.* Anyway, so this failed the newspaper-worthy test. But it might prove amusing for those here at EGD. It was either this or another letter from a gobsmacked Trump supporter, and I'm kinda sick of those.

     Big Boy's new mascot is a girl.
     Her name is Dolly.
     Let me say right off the bat, that I'm not outraged or offended.  Even though outrage is the coin of the realm in our social media world.  If only I could manage sputtering shock on command, if only rending my garments and rolling my eyes in goggled horror were my metier, well, then maybe I would be on television right now and you would all love me.
     Heck, it's their restaurant. If you want a girl to be the mascot for Big Boy, well, fine.  It's actually kinda of-the-moment.      
    Sincerely. Were I writing fiction, and wanted to somehow take the current kerfuffle over racist sports mascots and mash it together with the and-now-for-something-completely-different unease of processing the latest advance in gender fluidity, seasoned by the recent toppling of statues of erstwhile heroes—remember Big Boy restaurants are sometimes marked with large fiberglas figures of their burger deity—the arrival of Dolly, a supporting character in the Big Boy pantheon up to this point, with her own namesake sandwich, well, it's too perfect, right?
    Mascots are powerful. For instance, you probably know about Big Boy, even though the last Big Boy in Illinois, in Danville, bailed out of the franchise in 2017.  I grew up in Berea, Ohio, and we had our own Big Boy—it might have been our first sit-down restaurant. It must have been youthful lack of standards that imprinted the place in my affections, but growing familiarity with the chain—think of them as a Denny's with quality control issues—did not sour my liking for its funky hydrocephalic household god. A state of affairs outlined here a few years back.
     And yet, despite a series of awful dining experiences—the food arriving cold, or never arriving at all, leading my weeping children out to restaurant where the food does arrive—I don't blame the Boy. It isn't as if he knew.

Reddy Kilowatt

     I guess that's Dolly's problem now. Maybe a female mascot will help, and the disconnect between Big Boy being represented by a not-big-at-all girl might help the social acceptance of transgendered individuals (a shame Quaker didn't think of this: they could have replaced Aunt Jemima with Reddy Kilowatt. He's available). 
    Dolly is not an adequate replacement, not because she isn't male, but because she isn't big. Not a trace of chubbiness there, that you would expect if you actually ate the 1200-calorie sandwich. (Big Boy doesn't actually list the calories of the new Dolly sandwich; probably haven't done the chemical analysis yet. But a comparable sandwich is 1260, and Dolly's must be about the same, which itself is astounding. People knowingly eat that?)
     Nor does she have the retro charm of Big Boy. No checkered coveralls. No Reaganesque coif. No evil twinkle. She's a whitebread Smurf in drag.
     I think we're done here. The more I picked over the rhetoric coming from the Big Boy folks, the more I noticed they were creating a back door to yank their change back at any time. The shift might be temporary: poor Dolly, given the job as a symbolic token, unaware it'll be given back to the male when she's served her purpose. I began to suspect that what is happening here: Big Boy's is casting an envious eye on the fluke success of Popeye's chicken sandwich last year. Big Boy thought it would get it the game, and cooked up this half-hearted, half-assed PR scam. It was that, or actually make a quality chicken sandwich that people would want to eat, mascot be damned, and that obviously is beyond their capacities. Typical.
     Just to be clear, I wouldn't eat at a Big Boy under any circumstance, and don't want to be responsible for anyone else eating there. I even put away my Big Boy statuette collection, depicted above. We have to grow up eventually. 

* After this was posted, Frisch's Big Boy got back to me with a statement:

     “You may have heard that some Big Boy restaurants in Michigan, not affiliated with Frisch’s, are temporarily changing their mascot. At Frisch’s Big Boy, which operates in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, we’re remaining faithful to our beloved Big Boy. For more than 70 years, neighborhood Frisch’s restaurants have made memories with your family as the home of burgers, breakfast and Big Boy. We intend that to be the case for at least 70 more.”


   

‘Coalition of the decent’ takes on Trump

“Mr. Trump: You’re either a coward who can’t stand up to an ex-KGB goon, or you’re complicit,” ex-Navy SEAL Dan Barkhuff asks in “Betrayed,” one of the Lincoln Project’s powerful commercials. “Which is it?”

     They arrived like the cavalry, bugles blowing, flags flying.
     “Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics,” began a December op-ed in the New York Times announcing the formation of the Lincoln Project. “As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.”
     The Lincoln Project is a super PAC of Republican patriots taking a stand against a failed Republican president. In January their first video dropped, a pickaxe aimed at Trump’s evangelical base, cutting between fawning evangelical leaders — “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God!” — with a greatest hits reel of Trumpian crudities and cruelties.
     Since then the commercials arrive regularly, whistling in like artillery shells. They are quick, often appearing within a few hours of whatever outrage they are reacting to. They are blunt, not shying away from spotlighting Trump’s mental and physical decline. The latest, “Whispers,” released Tuesday, is murmured in Trump’s ear, fanning his despair and paranoia.
     “Why do you think you’re losing, Donald?” a woman purrs. “It’s because you have a loyalty problem.”
     In early May, “Mourning in America,” a twist on Ronald Reagan’s cheery phrase, was delivered into Trump’s head with laser-guided-bomb precision. The Lincoln Project spent $400,000 placing spots on Fox in the Washington, D.C., area with the intent to catch Trump’s attention. It worked. The president bit, hard, thrashing about like a hooked carp.

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Flashback 2008: Noise! Noise! Noise!

      I see The Mekons have a new album coming out, Exquisite. I'm not a fan of the English band—Rolling Stone describes them as "cowpunk," a heretofore unimagined (at least by me) blend of punk and country, which is just wrong).  I had lunch with them once, strangely enough, quite by accident. We were both invited to New Trier High School's literary festival, and it gave me the perfect excuse to follow up on a previous column, asking readers to send in suggestions of new love songs, something I wrote as my silent protest to Bob Greene suggesting that no new love songs of any value were written after his emotional life peaked and died in 1964.

     I'll never forget how the phone call inviting me to New Trier went.

     "Hi! We'd like you to talk about writing at our literary festival."

     "Okay..."

     "We give you lunch..."

     "Okay..."

     "And there's a gift bag..."

     "Okay..."

     "And we pay you a thousand dollars."

     Pause.

     "You know, you had me at 'we'd like you to talk about writing'..."

OPENING SHOT . . .

     People do not change as they grow older—I firmly believe that. They do not change, they only become more so, distilling, bubbling down to their essences, whether lumps of sweetness or thimbles of bile.
     Similarly, as the election day nears, the ceaseless clamor of issues and accusations, spin and counter spin, charges and counter-charges, reaches a crescendo, an elemental roar.
     John McCain compresses his party's hopes into the form of Joe the Plumber, a Regular Guy Everyman who represents the fearful white middle class. While Barack Obama tries to put his arms around a country where almost half—maybe more, maybe less, we'll soon see— are wriggling to escape his embrace.
     As the day approaches, the cacophony becomes so loud it falls silent. Perhaps all the noise has deafened us. I don't know about you, but I can hardly hear it anymore.

'Push your finger and make a sound...'

     Synchronicity happens—related events occurring together that have no apparent link. Not an hour after I finished Sunday's column about whether there were any great love songs written in the past decade, I found myself at New Trier High School, unexpectedly having lunch with Chicago songwriter Steve Dawson, plus Jon Langford and Sally Timms—part of the British punk band The Mekons—all of us there to talk to the kiddies about writing.
     Sensing an opportunity, I posed my question, first to Dawson.
     "There's a wave of acoustic love songs, more romantic songs than there have been in years," he said. "There's a whole wave of heart-on-your-sleeve songs."
     Such as?
     He mentioned "Falling Slowly," a song that was in the Irish film "Once" and won the Academy Award last year
     "I think that's a beautiful song," he said, and I agreed, then went to seek out The Mekons.
     "I think the Handsome family has some good, realistic love songs, serious love songs," said Langford, conferring with Timms. "The Magnetic Fields have written loads of great love songs."
     "Realistic" is one way to describe the Handsome Family. "Grim" might be more accurate: "You kept falling down and rolling on the ground/ like a drunken little bird flapping its broken wings . . ." This duo makes Tom Waits seem like The Archies.
     The Magnetic Fields are more my taste. The group, fronted by Stephen Merritt, even put out a boxed set called "69 Love Songs," which, to my surprise, actually has 69 tracks, paying homage to a wide range of musical styles, from Billie Holiday to Irving Berlin ("I'm so in love with you girl, it's like I'm on the moon; I can hardly breathe and I feel lighter.")
     I spent a sunny Sunday morning drinking Cafe du Monde coffee and listening to the suggestions that readers sent in and, boy, what a great way to make a living.
     The first reader-submitted song came Saturday morning from Terry Gavlin, of Brookfield, who sent an MP3 of "My Doorbell" by The White Stripes, a bouncy tune I listened to—golly—at least six times, just because of how Jack White's muted trumpet of a voice tumbles over the phrase "I've been thinkin' about . . ."
     Heather Swanson suggested "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz, a joyfully post-coital, reggae-syncopated song. Roy Gilbert said his teenage daughter likes "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White Ts ("cute and well-written," he said, accurately). Fred Ungaretta mentioned Coldplay's "Green Eyes" (A good song that begins, "Honey, you are a rock, upon which I stand. . .") He was one of several readers who plumped for Coldplay (a former student of mine just gave me a CD by Coldplay—an aptly named group: cold music, like ice floes sloshing on a frozen sea that seeps into your veins and, surprisingly, warms).
     All weekend I found myself quizzing everybody I met under 30 as to their idea of a great love song.
     "'Blue,' by Joni Mitchell," answered my 24-year-old niece—young people are already up-to-date, so they can take pride in antique tastes.
    "No," I said, "something recent."
     "Ben Harper—'Walk Away,' " she said, before whipping out her cell phone and playing a hip-hop song, "The Lite" by Common.
     "I think this is a love song," she said, listening carefully. "Oh yeah, this is totally a love song."
     But is it great? We can't be sure, not yet anyway, a truth that becomes clear when we remember that the classics, from jazz to Sinatra, from Elvis to rap, were ignored or loathed by the majority when they first arrived.
     "As a guy who is definitely old enough to be your father, when I first heard the Beatles I too thought, 'This is music?' " writes Allan Klein. "And then I started to listen very carefully and lo and behold, realized that their writing was truly wonderful, specifically, 'Yesterday.' "
     Klein recommended Renee Olstead, and I have to admit that, listening to her gin-clear voice slowly peal out George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" makes a person doubt the chances of the Magnetic Fields catalogue to withstand the grind of time.
     Then again, it doesn't have to. There is no greatest love song, only the love song that means the most to you at the moment, and I if had to pick one from all the songs suggested—thanks everybody; much fun—I'd have to go with Ben Harper's "Walk Away." There's even a bit of Cole Porter wordplay ("You put the happi- in my ness"). It begins with careful acoustic guitar and then, "Oh no, here comes that sun again/That means another day without you, my friend"—how's that for an opening line?—"And it hurts me to look into the mirror at myself/and it hurts even more to have to be with somebody else/And it's so hard to do, and so easy to say, but sometimes, sometimes, you just have to walk away."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

There are a lot of good Beatles jokes online, such as this one:

Q: When did Paul McCartney write "Silly Love Songs?"

A: From 1962 to 2008.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 27, 2008

History is not a fairy tale to make us happy

Parson Weems' Fable, by Grant Wood (Courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art)

     Friday we saw our president stand before Mount Rushmore and make an impassioned plea against what he called “a merciless campaign to erase our history” and in favor of what we can call the Parson Weems’ Fable view of the past.
     You remember Parson Weems’ Fable. Or maybe you don’t. That’s one problem with history: There’s so much. The Rev. Mason Weems wrote about a young George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. The lad is confronted by his father and confesses, “I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” Such is the honesty of our leaders!
     In the view of our current president, who cannot tell the truth, the founders who created this country were perfect, while participants in the national drama who were not white men are flawed, fringe figures, Betsy Ross sewing a flag.
     The problems with the Parson Weems’ Fable view of history are many, but two stand out.
     First, it didn’t happen. Despite Weems calling the story “too true to be doubted,” the cherry tree episode was invented, historians agree, to sell books. Hence Parson Weems’ Fable; kind of a giveaway really.
     Second, history as a series of saints to venerate instead of study implies that these men are responsible for everything that transpired. Also untrue — if history were about ordinary people bending to the will of leaders, we’d all be happily nodding along with Donald Trump. When only 38% of us are. The rest are bouncing in our chairs, eager to toss him onto the ash heap come November.

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