America is a house divided against itself

Abraham Lincoln, photographed in Chicago

     There wasn't room in the printed column, but I wanted to point out that if you actually do go to the corner of Lake and Dearborn in an attempt to stand where Lincoln once stood, you'll be about 40 feet too high, because the location of the Tremont House would be far below your feet, before the downtown area was raised up.

  

    A columnist must be careful what he confesses. The idea is to echo common wisdom, not let slip some weird, damning personal detail.
     Fortune favors the bold, so here goes: I have trouble remembering that Abraham Lincoln walked the streets of Chicago. I mean, I know, intellectually, he was here. He was a lawyer. He argued cases in court here. But I sometimes forget, and occasionally marvel anew at Lincoln’s presence. Judge me harshly if you must.
     For instance: On July 10, 1858, Lincoln gave a speech from the balcony at the Tremont House, at Lake and Dearborn. His opponent in the senatorial race, Stephen Douglas, had attacked Lincoln from the same perch, and Lincoln, in town on legal business, promised to reply.
     Douglas had criticized Lincoln for his radical “House Divided” speech. In accepting the Republican nomination in Springfield the month before, Lincoln had quoted Scripture.
     “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln had said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
     Lincoln was wrong in two ways. First, the house did fall. The Union did dissolve. The South preferred succession to abandoning slavery. Though this wasn’t what Douglas and Lincoln were arguing over, not in 1858. Slavery was a given in the South. They were debating whether slavery should extend to new states. Douglas argued: if you ban slavery in Kansas, you’ll end up forced to treat Black people as equals. It’s a fear candidates have run on successfully — Douglas won, remember — for 160 years.
     The Civil War is in mind lately because my liberal pals bemoan the current national divide, suggesting we are at some historic low. I remind them that the nation did, in fact, break apart in a war that killed 620,000 Americans. That was worse. Just because it happened a long time ago doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

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The world came back to life!

André De Shields

     The sun rose clear Wednesday morning. Bright sun, cloudless skies. warm. I hooked up Kitty and we headed out, hoping the brisk walk would drive away the fantods of the long Tuesday election night vigil. It was 1 a.m. before I gave up and went to bed. How could he win again? How could he even come close?

     Music seemed essential. I set aside Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad," to find comfort in the first song I could think of, "I Still Believe," by the Call. A good anthem for when things get dark, with one of the better opening lyrics: "I been in a cave, 40 days, only a spark, to light my way..." and the chorus, "I still believe."
    Do I still believe? Sure, I still believe. But in what? America? In my fellow citizens? How can I? Even if Joe Biden should squeak this out, look how close a thing it was. Four years of staring at the monstrosity of Trump and millions and millions want to sign up for another go around.  We live in a time when belief has a bad name, when you see what people believe in. Maybe faith in the decency of America is just another baseless delusion. Not maybe, obviously. Look around. 

Old woman or young?

     Nah, I don't quite believe that either. If the past four years have taught me anything, it's the importance of framing—where you focus, which facts you spotlight. It's like one of those illusions you see first the young lady, then the crone. You can see those who are 100 percent committed to doing whatever Donald Trump wants, in Arizona, where they're behind, chanting "Count the votes!" while in Georgia, where they're ahead, chanting "Stop the count!"  Or you can see those who line up for hours to try to put an end to it, who march and argue and educate. 

     People are foolish and brave, hypocritical and idealistic . That I do believe.

     A neighbor coming the other way, another silver-haired man, also walking a little dog. I might have been approaching a mirror, but, well, he's taller and handsomer. He looked at me. I popped out an Air Pod.
     "The city didn't burn down," he said. Must be a Trumpski, if he's still fretting about those riots in May. Worried about Black people coming through his window in Northbrook and taking his Precious Moments figurines. Probably armed.
     "The sun rose clear," I replied, puffing the dust off a little Thoreau. "I was downtown last night. Very quiet."
     So the Trumpskis and the Bidenites are talking. That's good, right?

     We went our ways. I finished "I Still Believe," started it again, gave up—kinda mid-1980s—and switched immediately to "The Road to Hell," the opening number of "Hadestown," Anais Mitchell's Broadway musical.
     "And on the road to hell there is a lot of waiting..." 

     Ya think?

     Just before the pandemic set in, last February, my wife and I flew to New York over Valentine's Day weekend, to visit our older son. Our younger came up from Virginia, and I suggested the family take in a Broadway show. Through some rare, perhaps unprecedented arrangement of the spheres, they not only all agreed, but took my suggestion, "Hadestown." And there were tickets available.
     I had been a fan of Mitchell, and her initial version of the musical, for years, but the Broadway cast is even better. I've listened to it several times since the pandemic set in. The musical is a mash-up of Greek myth, of Orpheus, who follows his love Eurydice down to hell, and Hades and Persephone, the king of the underworld and his queen, all set to a New Orleans roadhouse beat, with blatting trumpets and whisked drums, starring that longtime Chicago actor, André De Shields, who's in his 70s now, but radiates energy and charm and cool, with his precise singing style, all sly humor and calibrated and a kind of drawl.  He's Hermes, the messenger, narrator of the story—he won a Tony for the role. 

    De Shields' voice is a muted trumpet snarl, and sometimes when quarantine somnolence threatens to completely numb me, I steel my spirit just by thinking of him, in his French Quarter funeral finery, spreading his arms and exuding, "The world... came back... to life!!!"

     It's gonna happen. All we have to do is wait until spring.

     The lyrics touch upon a number of contemporary woes, from our ever more extreme weather, to the gap between those who have and those who don't, the world we dream of and the world we've got, with dewy eyed youth seeking something and crafty age grasping more, Orpheus penning his song in a bar and Hades building his wall in hell.  Like the seasons, there is a circularity to the story, an old story, whose ending we know, but we tell it anyway.

     By the time I got back to the house, I was fortified, ready to face the latest news, and found rays of hope piercing the gloom. A good walk and good music will do that. It's an old song, and in our hearts we know how it must end, in tragedy. But we sing it anyway.

     

COVID just one more Election Day challenge

 

Jackie Garmon at the Loop Super Site, 191 N. Clark.

     The newspaper asked me to write a column about COVID and the election, which is below. As for Election Night ... well, unlike some, I'm in no rush. However it ends, we'll have elected a man who embodies American values. That is one scary thought.

     Even in ordinary times, the American electoral system presents a strange business model: a service offered in a dozen languages — including Urdu, Gujarati and Bengali — to customers from 18 to 108, whose millions of choices must be immediately tabulated by seasonal workers. The fate of the nation hinges on the process being done correctly — plus, in a crowning surreal touch, patrons, though adults, expect a sticker when they’re done, like children visiting the doctor.
     Now add a global pandemic.
     “COVID changed everything,” Marisel Hernandez, chair of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, said last week.
     The March 17 primary was a dry run which saw city and state feuding up to the last minute over whether to hold an election at all. New York canceled theirs, and 15 other states postponed. Holding Illinois’ primary proved educational.
     “We learned a lot,” Hernandez said. “Every election has its own obstacles, but March was the most challenging we ever had. We had locations closing. Owners refusing to let us use their places for polling. Judges canceling. As a result of that election, we learned how valuable, how important early voting and voting by mail is.”
     In the primary, the city rolled out new touch screens, ballot scanners and tabulation software. Before anyone had heard of coronavirus, worried election officials tried to guard against Election Day malfunctions by ramping up early voting. Now early voting is standard: For the first time in history, more Americans voted early than are expected to cast a ballot on Election Day.

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The last mile

     Today? You don't have to be Nostradamus to see what's coming. Joe Biden is going to win by a wide majority, the Democrats might even take the Senate too. Whether or not it's "official" by midnight will be a matter of state-by-state logistics. Besides, we'll have the sideshow beginning at 7:01 p.m. EST Donald Trump will throw the mother of all tantrums and dispatch his lawyers all over to, oh, I don't know, sue the United States people for not re-electing him.
     That's what Trump does. Sue and threaten to sue. It won't work this time, but it'll kick up dust.
     Yes, my prediction isn't a 100 percent certainty. All those Americans jamming the polls could be people who simply love what the Donald has done with the coronavirus, all the denial and bumbling, and want four more years just like this. I mean, it's possible. I like to fancy my fellow Americans aren't capable of that. I try, like Anne Frank, to think that people are good at heart.
     Of course look what happened to her.
     I'm most interested in Trump's exit. I keep seeing, in my mind's eye, something like the end of "Angels With Dirty Faces." You might not remember, the 1938 movie where Jimmy Cagney plays Rocky, a tough guy gang leader condemned to die, and the local priest, played by Pat O'Brien, convinces him that, instead of going haughtily to his doom, to fake cowardice, so the kids won't look up to him anymore and follow him into his life of crime. So he trashes his reputation, groveling and begging—"I don't want to die, oh please!!!"— and clinging to a radiator. (At about 3:34 into this clip, if you want to see it).
     It isn't a perfect metaphor, since Cagney is doing something noble, and for Trump nobility is almost a physical impossibility. It'll be the opposite, something venal, genuine groveling and begging and clinging to the radiator of power.
     I can't imagine it otherwise. Trump never for a second considered what is good for the country, and won't start now. The odd thing is, once defeated, leaving with a shred of dignity would ultimately help him. But it's too late for that now.

     The strange thing is his fans will cling to him. They've accepted every whine, whimper and complaint. I heard from enough of them yesterday to know it just flies past them. I kinda feel sorry for them. If things work out the way I anticipate, this will be a frightening and confusing time for them. I hope they work through it. As for the rest of us, well, notice the faces on the press gallery as Rocky starts his act. I figure, watching Trump, our reaction will be something like that. Give the man credit; he will retain his ability to amaze to the bitter end. 

On and on and on until maybe it just ... stops?

 

    From that ride down the escalator in Trump Tower to slur Mexican immigrants as rapists kicking off the winking bigotry of a campaign that steamrolled his mediocre Republican primary opponents as just so many wide-eyed fawns blinking in the headlights with a “build the wall!” bluster that amazingly worked thanks to a boost by the Russians and the disastrous last-minute intercession of the FBI director forever searing “but her emails!” as the catchphrase for irrelevant whataboutism immediately replaced by the cold nausea of his this-is-actually-happening Electoral College victory and the shocking realization that the history of America will now pass from George Washington to his orange mug under its bottle blond cotton candy hairdo staring out from presidential placemats forever mocking the brief flicker of hope that somehow the grave responsibility of being the most powerful man in the world might limit his bottomless narcissism only it didn’t from Day One when he bitterly complained the National Park Service undercounted the crowd at his inauguration which it didn’t this being the first fleck of an endless vomit of lies and lies and more lies spattering a path of slime on which he crept forward continually whining and carping in a rolling meltdown that would be embarrassing from a toddler with its shriek of me-me-me and woe-am-I forming the disgusting pus gleefully lapped

up by millions of eternally credulous dupes who adore him thanks in part to the airtight symbiosis between himself and fawning Fox News ballyhooing what adviser Kelly Anne Conway called “alternate facts” and before the first week was out he denied people from seven Muslim majority countries entry to our nation beginning a war on refugees that tore children from their mothers’ arms to be caged then lost thanks to intentional policies cooked up by his resident stone cold hater Stephen Miller to make America rather than a beacon of hope instead perpetrator of ...

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Life gives, and then...

     Kanye West ran a two-page advertisement in the New York Times Friday, with a dove on the left hand page and some kind of letter about hope and peace on the right. I read it, wondering if it was some kind of plug for Trump, but it was just gibberish—the general consensus is it has something to do with his supposed presidential campaign. But how it helps West, I cannot say.
     "This must have set him back" I said to my wife.
     This pointless indulgence reminded me of an advertisement I'd seen in the Gray Lady and taken a photo of a few weeks previous: the one that ran after Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in literature. Here, take a look and tell me if what stood out to me stands out for you:

     I mean, really, could they make the ad any smaller? I took out a ruler and measured: 1/12th of a page, or 1/24th of the ad Kanye West took out for no particular purpose.

     It isn't as if her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is a marginal operation. It's a division of Macmillan Publishers, which is part of the gigantic Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, with some $2 billion in annual revenues, making it an even bigger deal than Kanye West, if such as thing is possible.

     I know publishing is on hard times. But still, it isn't as if they hand out the Nobel Prize in Literature every day. The FS&G folks couldn't have heard the news and thought, "Again?! Now we'll have to run another congratulatory ad!" Would a quarter page have wrecked their budget?

     I can't speak for Glück—maybe being a superlative poet puts you beyond such things. But I've read all of her poetry, and she is a very grounded, practical, table-and-chair kind of poet. I can see her scanning the paper for her ad, sighing, looking around as if to find an audience, and saying, "Really?" 

     Though immediately smiling then, because one doesn't succeed as a poet without learning that the world, she has her little jokes, and there is no rose without thorns, no honor given without mitigation, sometimes enough to counterbalance the honor itself, and then some. Life gives, and then takes away. That's the essence of poetry right there.

Texas notes: Logger

     One of the pleasures of reading these Saturday reports from Caren Jeskey, EGD's Austin bureau chief, is you find yourself having thoughts so singular they're almost startling, realizations you've literally never had before. Such as, "I've never met a logger...."

     Vermonters know as much about snow as Chicagoans know about pizza. Twenty-odd years ago I found myself post-holing (one of many terms I learned on a winter vacation in the state of Freedom and Unity) through the woods. It’s when you try to move through hip-deep snow without snow shoes. Your legs create long deep cylindrical grooves—one exhausting step a time—as you progress, creating perfect impressions for fence posts. The thing is, I wasn’t building a fence but just trying to get back to civilization after a romance failed around a pot-bellied stove.
     It all started when I met a charming banjo player with stringy blond hair and a boyish smile. We were at a concert in a drafty old church in Burlington, Vermont. He invited me to join him on a vintage river boat for dinner the next night. My friend and host on that visit ixnayed the idea because we wouldn’t have much time together on this precious visit. She’d recently moved to Vermont to open a cooking school and learn to make artisan cheese. I told him that I couldn’t make it, and we exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch.
     I loved flying to that part of the world. The tiny plane on the last leg of the trip sent us through a portal to a more romantic era. It promised freshly roasted coffee with clotted cream, tawny liquids, bacon from the pigs next door, and fresh milks from various creatures. A land of stellar musicians who spent a lot of time honing their skills during long dark days. Vermont also offered hardy companions who helped me challenge my idea of what cold is, and the capabilities of my body in the winter.
    When we landed, a kind businessman I’d been chatting with on the plane offered to drive me to into town. I accepted because it was my birthday and I felt safe and ensconced in that happy feeling of a special day.
    When he left I picked up the local paper as I waited for my friend and host to come and get me. The front page headline read “Moose Loose In Winooski.” My urban brain was scrambled for a moment with that combination of consonants and concepts. The article instructed townsfolk to leave a wandering moose alone as he traversed their town, and trust that he’d eventually head back into the hinterlands where he lived. After all, humans had settled on his turf. There was no reason to drive him away. I found this deeply touching and humane and also hoped I would not run into him.
     My friend arrived in her Subaru wagon and whisked us away.  The rest of the visit was storybook stuff—brunch at Shelburne Farms housed around a Vanderbilt mansion on Lake Champlain and wood fired pizza at American Flatbread situated in the valley of the Mad River on a farm in Waitsfield. We sat on Adirondack chairs around a crackling fire pit in the crisp cold air, dodging embers and gazing at the brightly starlit sky.
    When the trip was over and I got back home, the banjo picker and I stayed in touch. We grew close during daily hours-long phone calls. He came to Chicago to visit me and we were smitten.
Soon after his visit I’d lined up a job interview in a town close to his, and not far from my Chicago chef friend. I headed back on a jumper plane with the possibility of a sultry life replete with cigars and sitting around fires full of hand-chopped wood from the always bountiful pile just outside the door.
     The story didn’t go as planned. Banjo strummer’s decidedly un-feminist ways rubbed me wrong. We found that the only thing we really had in common was a mutual desire to kiss each other a lot. We made the best of the trip but by the end it had fallen apart so badly that one night I just booked a flight to New York. In the morning I asked him to drive me to the local gas station where I had a cab pick me up. When I got to the warmth and comfort of real friends in NY the running joke was how I’d had to post-hole out of town.
     One night before things went south Banjo and I were at a restaurant with red checkered tablecloths and candles on each table. A live band played and Banjo’s friends packed into the round red vinyl booth with us. We were all hoping that this meal would christen a new member into their friend group. One of the guys was a dark haired logger. When he got up and said goodbye the table went nuts with whoops and hollers once he out of earshot. “Caren!” they said. “We have never seen him stay awake for so long! We need you here!” They explained that he has a serious case of narcolepsy and generally falls asleep several times when he’s out with them. I was so excited about my new friends I guess the animated stories I regaled him with kept him awake.
     All I could think was “a narcoleptic logger?” Did anyone else think his job might be a little dangerous? If so, no one mentioned it. Sometimes I wonder how he’s doing; how they are all doing. Many people have come and gone in my life on my journeys and we’ve made each other’s lives richer.
     How odd it is to think about what travel and meeting strangers will look like—or not look like—in my new reality. Lately I am realizing how stories of the past help me see and feel the meaning of my life as it was, and inform the direction I aim to go in my “one wild and precious life,” in the hopeful words of poet Mary Oliver.