An unexpected bonus for the shorter man

     Over the past year, I’ve worn a coat and tie exactly once. The incoming director general of the Taiwanese economic and cultural office in Chicago wanted to get acquainted over a Zoom call. I knew he’d be wearing a coat and tie, and didn’t want to be disrespectful: they’ve got enough of that coming from communist China already.
     It was, as they say in diplomatic circles, a frank and productive exchange of ideas.
     A few minutes before we spoke, I stood before the mirror in the bedroom, fingers fluttering at the necktie — blue, not red, for obvious reasons. I wondered if I’d remember how to tie it. But I’ve been tying neckties since 1974, when I played the Mr. Darling/Captain Hook role in “Peter Pan” at Camp Wise and had to tie a tie onstage while delivering lines. You don’t forget.
     The COVID-19 era was pants optional, business conducted from your living room. Now, with the non-wackadoodle segment of the country getting vaccinated, and beginning to emerge from our long hibernation, the question is: Are we going to start dressing up? Or go to work in sweats? Or even buy new clothes? Those with a dog in the race are optimistic.
     “The courts aren’t open, there’s no theater, no trade shows, the financial institutions are all still closed,” said Scott Shapiro, owner of Syd Jerome, the high-end Loop men’s clothing store, which has had plywood over its windows since August.
     “There’s no reason to put displays in the windows because nobody is walking by,” said Shapiro.
     Even without mannequins displaying cashmere sweaters and Italian belts, “our customers are slowly coming back.” A certain Chicago milieu is always going to look sharp.

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Enigmatic bean bag

 

     Last Friday I go downtown. My wife wants to stop by her office and pick up a few things, so I figured, go with her, keep her company, and stop by mine. What in spring 2020 was an obligation has become, by spring 2021, an outing.
      So I drop her off at the Thompson Center, park on Madison, enter the building for the first time in months, say hello to the guard, chat with the two colleagues who are also there—Jeff from IT, and John on the copy desk. Go into my office and start in on my pile of mail, begin listening to my 100 or so voicemails, 90 or so from the same guy. Give up that quickly.
     Before I leave, I made a pit stop, and there I see it. How long has it been there? Not last Christmas, certainly. Maybe the Christmas before, we had a Christmas party. There was good food from local restaurants, fancy drinks and games, such as cornhole. I assume everyone is familiar with cornhole, a sort of shuffleboard where you toss beanbags onto an inclined board. You get a point for landing a beanbag on the board and three points if it goes into the hole. Fun for picnics and parties. I played a few rounds—how could you not?
    I'd have never thought of it again. But afterward, whenever I walked down that hall, I noticed this one blue bean bag that must have been left behind. It was a pleasant reminder of the party—some years we didn't have parties—and I always sort of smiled at it. There's something friendly about a bean bag. Now that I think of it, maybe it wasn't from 2019. Maybe it was from 2018. Or even before. Time all blends together at this point.
     This isn't a criticism of the sanitation of the place. It's always clean. But somehow, in its cleaning, the bean bag remains. I assume that has to be intentional, and therein lies the mystery. An in-joke of some sort? A statement? Some ghost-in-the-machine cleaning in the wee hours, deftly detouring around it, a slight jog of the broom, an act of mercy, the way you'll pity a missing sock?
     I'm not sure I want to know. There must be some prosaic reason nowhere near the limits of imagination (the bean bag....thrown away of course ... stirs, and begins its arduous nightly climb out of the trash, ruffling through the papers, reaching the lip of the can and toppling out with a beany plop, slowly, determinedly crawling, expanding and contracting like a caterpillar, back toward its Beloved Spot...)
     One of those Office Mysteries that make going into work in a place appealing. Back when we, you know, all went someplace to work.

Both facts and fact-checking a threat to GOP

 

      Republican junk jams my spam email file, scores of panting messages every day. A quick sample: “Biden Threatens War With Russia” and “Exposed: Biden’s Plot To Crush Gun Owners” and “FIRE Fauci.”
     Almost every communication ends with a plea for cash, all hyperventilating with the frantic, the-house-on-fire-save-the-baby! hysteria that is the official GOP tone: cry doom and rattle the cup. To be fair, Democrats do it, too, though I don’t get nearly as many. I’m not sure why.
     Maybe the same trolls who sign me up for fringe gun nut groups under the mistaken notion it bothers me also donate in my name to Republican candidates. Maybe the emails are sent to every known address including mine. Who can say?
     I usually never click on them or even read the subject line. There are too many. But I do sometimes open the spam file to take a peek before deleting everything, like someone glancing into the toilet bowl before flushing.
     Occasionally, something catches my attention, such the subject line, “My family’s story is being fact-checked?!” from U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), who will give the GOP response to President Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress April 28.
     Fact-checking is a good thing in the world of the mainstream media. But then again, so are facts. The idea that fact-checking would be used as a cry of grievance is like someone shouting out a window, “Help me, my kitchen is being cleaned!” It certainly is intriguing.
     The email from Scott, the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate, begins:
     “The mainstream media has decided to fact-check my family’s story of ‘cotton to Congress in one lifetime.’ That’s right, The Washington Post has been investigating my family’s history in the South and downplaying the struggles and racism they faced. It’s shameful. Plain and simple.”

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Bat out of hell

    Jim Steinman died in Connecticut Monday, and that evening I held my own little tribute, and didn't even know it.
     I walk the dog three times a day. In the morning, I often listen to a podcast, something like Molly Jong-Fast's "The New Abnormal." In the afternoon, usually Audible, this week George Saunders' "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." 
     But by evening a little music is often called for. For some reason, Monday, I felt nostalgic, so listened to a few cuts from Elton John's "Blue Moves." 

    "On a bench, on a beach, just before the sun had gone, I tried to reach you..." 

Bernie Taupin could pen a lyric.
     Then I listened to "Bat out of Hell," all 10 minutes of it. I remember when the album came out in 1977, in the fall of my senior year of high school. The title song was written for 17-year-olds, and it summed up my entire worldview at that point. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but I sure as hell wasn't going to do it in Berea, Ohio.
     The album had memorable cover art—a pumped-up romance novel cover hero bursting out of a graveyard on an apocalyptic motorcycle. It was produced by Todd Rundgren, who thought the whole thing a hilarious parody of Bruce Springsteen. It kinda was, and a few members of the E Street Band, Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, actually play on the album.    
     Around that time, Meat Loaf appeared on Saturday Night Life, looking like the the bloated corpse of Elvis, stringy wet hair in his face, drown in sweat, holding a scarf, eyes crazy. I can't say I was a fan, as such. He was weird.
     And no, the New York Times never referred to him as "Mr. Loaf" on second reference. That's a myth. I checked.
     Steinman played piano on the song, and wrote a number of other standards that are big and dramatic and hold up—Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," sort of the distaff version of "Bat Out of Hell," fate conquered, not through escape, but by powering past confusion into love. "I don't know what to do, I'm always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks..."
     "Bat Out of Hell" came to its götterdämmerung conclusion just as Kitty and I padded down the darkened Center Avenue toward our big old house, lit up like a cruise ship. I idly mused that there would be no "bat out of hell" escape for me now. I don't want it, and couldn't figure out how to achieve one even if I did. There's no need; I fled home once, and found this, everything I was ever looking for, and more. With the help of that song. So thanks Jim. Rest in peace.

Texas notes: Salut

     Friday morning I had to head downtown, so I thought to save time by having a Soylent for breakfast. Soylent is basically Ensure for young people. Then I read this report from Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey, which resonated even more personally than most.

     Ambience is everything. An ex once told me “your life can be a French movie if you want it to be.” That was some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. I like to stage my home with Amelie’s eye (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/amelie-2001)— vases full of unwieldy, bright wildflowers, Debussy, Peter Sarstedt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBaDUzFdGc8) or Vocalo Radio playing softly in the background, lamps that cast tawny shadows on wooden walls. Carefully chosen art that brings you straight into other dimensions— some have symbols of ancient archetypal knowing, another is bright and energizing and will sweep you away to a Chinese sunset if you let it. There are various flutes resting on shelves and a music stand with swirling and sophisticated bass and treble clefs boldly stamped upon sheet music.
     Art, music, certain aromas and other forms of beauty open our minds, soothe our souls, and bring us into moments of sublime peace. Good art should not be relegated to museums. There’s no reason for bad art to be out there at all. Why are we forced to gaze upon flat and boring prints from generic mega-stores when we sit in a waiting room? Why do we have so many unattractive places all around us? Je ne sais pas.
     Why do hospitals, for example, have garish fluorescent lights that make even a healthy person look gray and sickly? As if the cold concrete structures weren’t bad enough, they have to torture us further. I’m convinced that there is a special breed of designer with a knack for choosing furniture and paint colors that won “World’s Worst” somewhere along the way.
     The food is usually pretty disgusting too, and does not scream nourishment. Who ever decided that Ensure was a good idea? Ah yes. The same marketers that pepper our environment with horrid signage outside of strips of malls.  Better yet? Just go inside and find some cheap plastic garbage that we buy for $1 and eventually toss into landfills.
     After decades of working in hospitals I still cringe at the sight of a can of Ensure. It doesn’t take an Ivy League educated person to tell you there have to be better options. I turned to my trusty pal Google: “Supplemental nutrition shakes contain more than just healthy ingredients. ‘You may be getting more sugar than any of the other ingredients,’ says Stacey Nelson, a dietitian from Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.” https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/supplemental-nutrition-drinks-help-or-hype
     This is America. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY) We do so many things that seem obviously wrong, yet the powers that be are 100% committed to maintaining the status quo, no matter how broken it is.
     We are stuck in ruts around how to take care of our most vulnerable members. Many school systems are broken beyond repair, yet we keep chugging along, printing outdated textbooks. We squeeze the creativity out of our brightest and best young minds with time-outs rather than the time-ins they are craving. We are obsessed with medicating kids rather than finding creative ways to engage them and help them succeed. If they are living in households where their parents are vegging out to bad TV and no one is helping them cultivate their own inner beauty, how are they expected to show up at school with the grace, curiosity and self discipline teachers desire? Are the teachers numb too? Sometimes.
     We also do the opposite of what should be happening with those slipping into dementia. This article reminds me of the fact that we can do things better. “We have shown that it is a useful tool for arguing that segregation, in the form of care homes, of people living with dementia is a human rights violation. This article provides a basis on which to engage policymakers and dementia care stakeholders in reconsidering ‘self-evident’ and taken-for-granted structural conditions of aged care systems and material aspects of the residential aged care facility built environment that shape the lives of people with dementia.” (https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/8/3/18)
     Once again, with a move coming up in 7 days and a lot on my mind, I have gone on about something I didn’t intend to write about. My original topic was going to be the Salons of better days gone by. Poetry readings under a spotlight in the desert. Talented musicians bringing their gifts to us. Playing, dancing, singing. I will share those stories another time.
     Here is some unsolicited advice I do my best to take for myself. Remember to place objects of beauty all around you. They don’t have to be expensive. An oil painting from Goodwill will suffice. Diffuse tangerine and lavender into your space, or spray lavender mist around the room and on your pillows. Fill your place with plants. Talk to them. They will thrive and you will too. Notice the sounds around you. Notice how what you are listening to and watching makes you feel. Infuse each day with silence. As I write this I hear the ticking of my analog clock and slow raindrops beating on the roof. Savor moments more often. Chew and taste your food. Walk more slowly, talk more slowly. Be mindful, and little by little, as you hone yourself you’ll see that this world is actually pretty wonderful. And there’s always hope that certain things will get better.

Pausing to savor Ald. Burke’s anti-Semitism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     “You know as well as I do, Jews are Jews,” Ald. Ed Burke (14th) said into a federal wiretap, “and they’ll deal with Jews to the exclusion of everybody else, unless ... unless there’s a reason for them to use a Christian.”
     My immediate response — I kid you not, I did this, first thing — was to consult “The Canterbury Tales.” Because there is something positively medieval to Burke’s remarks. Clannishness is such an old accusation to fling at Jews and illustrates the circular logic of bigotry: You exclude a people from society, wall them up in a ghetto, then denounce them for sticking together.
     One trick of racism — and this doesn’t get mentioned enough — is to attack specific groups for doing what all people do. When somebody accuses Jews of being fond of money, I retort, “As opposed to ... what? All those people who aren’t?” Every single ethnic, religious and social group will at times interact among themselves and exclude outsiders.
     Jews stick together, just like Presbyterians, Lithuanians and Rotarians do. Yiddish was once a unifying tongue, now simply being Jewish is a language that Jews speak.
     When I first had coffee with Rahm Emanuel, he started talking about Hanukkah, which was approaching. It confused me for a moment, because I didn’t know why the mayor would bring it up.
     Then it dawned on me, with some horror, “Ohhh, it’s because we’re both Jews. He wants me to bond with him as a fellow Jew.” I couldn’t have been more aghast had he put his hand on my knee.
     Accusations of prejudice fall into two broad categories. Complaints about actual harm that is suffered because of intolerance: hurtful remarks hurled, housing denied, police blithely killing people like yourself. Those are real evils that are legitimately decried.

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Flashback 2011: 'Never' could be now in city mayoral race

     Time really shoots by. When I saw Ald. Ed Burke in the news Wednesday, talking trash about Jews into a federal wiretap, I first looked on the blog for this column, figuring I wrote it during the last seven years. Nope, 2011, setting the stage for Rahm Emanuel's first run as mayor.

    I remember feeling a little guilty at the time, disinterring this 35-year-old quote and waving it under the nose of my old pal Ed. So it's a little bit of a relief to find his feelings toward my people continue unchanged. For those who missed Burke's recent remark, courtesy of the Justice Department:

     "You know as well as I do, Jews are Jews and they'll deal with Jews to the exclusion of everybody else, unless ... unless there's a reason for them to use a Christian."

     I think I'll give it the full analysis in my column Friday. Until then, we chatted about his assessment of Jews and politics in 2011:

   

"Who is to blame for the war!"

     "A Jew will never be elected mayor of Chicago," Ed Burke said. "There is a latent anti-Semitism in Chicago and a large population that will never vote for a Jew. They would vote for anybody before a Jew."
     Granted, Burke said that a long time ago—in 1976, three days before Richard J. Daley died. Then Burke was a 32-year-old "young Turk" on the City Council. Now he is its elder lion, king of the Finance Committee and, with Rahm Emanuel in a position to possibly be elected Chicago's first Jewish mayor Tuesday, and his faith in the headlines—I didn't want to be the guy to broach the subject—I wondered whether Burke, who is backing Gery Chico, cared to revisit his remarks.
     "Times have changed a lot," Burke said Friday. "I was talking about politics in general. I was not advocating that position, I was making an observation."
     Burke pointed out that, in the same interview (with Milton Rakove—you can read the whole thing in his excellent oral history We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent), he also talked about bias in the electorate against Catholics.
     "There was only one Catholic elected governor of Illinois," he said to me. "In 1911."
     There is no question voters don't take the same chauvinistic view of candidates as they once did; John F. Kennedy's Catholicism was a huge issue in 1960, by 2004, few people even knew that John Kerry had studied to be a priest. Emanuel's faith was hardly mentioned until a union leader called him a "Judas" and Mayor Daley condemned it as an anti-Semitic slur. What caused times to change?
     "I think people are more educated," said Burke. "You'll find that, as children get educated, they help break down stereotypes that parents carried with them. A lot of people grew up in the Depression, and people who held those stereotypes are no longer alive."
     Not to say that prejudice has been banished—not judging by my e-mail. There will always be bigots, but a) they become more circumspect, using whatever codes can still be trotted out in public (hence Emanuel is an "outsider" and Barack Obama "born in Kenya"); b) there are fewer of them, relatively.
     Just as knee-jerk, ethnic-based rejection has ebbed, so has its flip side, automatic support. Though not everybody has gotten the memo. The effort to find a "consensus candidate" in the black community, for instance, was based on a false assumption—that African Americans would line up behind whichever African American they picked, even Carol Moseley Braun. Unless something very unexpected happens Tuesday, Braun will be remembered for trying to take a streetcar to City Hall long after streetcars vanished and the tracks were torn up.
     Past ethnic dynamics can also linger in ways that aren't quite bigotry. Just as there are bigots opposed to anyone Jewish (or black, or Catholic) I'm sure many Jews feel a frisson of ethnic pride at just the thought of a fellow Jew being mayor of Chicago. 

"The scourge of humanity."

     To me, that's OK if you're 5 years old and Sandy Koufax is pitching for the Dodgers. Among adults, you hope that such considerations take a distant second place to—oh, for instance—who'll make the best mayor.
     I've said it before, but I still think that either Emanuel or Chico, both being savvy, smart rich guys who gigged the system for their own pecuniary behalf, would have no trouble running the city, and each would offer personal advantages. Emanuel has that rock-star-driven ferret of ambition thing going; that would be fun to watch—from a distance, as the moment the mayor's office door clicks behind him he'll run a ship sealed so tight that it'll make the closed granite fortress of the Daley administration seem like one of those loosey-goosy communes twirling around a VW bus at a Grateful Dead concert.
     As for Chico —well, no need for me to cite his benefits when I have Ed Burke on the line. I asked him why he is supporting Chico.
     "It's pretty hard for me to turn my back on somebody who has been with me for 35 years," Burke said. "He worked for me while going to law school. I recommended him for his first job as a lawyer. I've known his whole family going back to his parents, his uncles, all Back-of-the-Yards people. They were supporters of my father."
     I complimented Burke on his over-the-decades loyalty to Chico, particularly given the fact that Emanuel is so strongly favored to win—and has said Burke may lose his police detail and chairmanship of the City Council Finance Committee.
     Was it smart politics, I asked the alderman, to ignore this hard reality for what is basically a sentimental consideration?
     "We'll talk again, Neil," he said, hanging up.
                            —Originally published Feb. 21, 2011