From Babylon to now, fight goes on and on

 

    The Bible is not the gateway to history that some wish it to be.
     The Passover story? Enslaved Jews making bricks, Moses, plagues, escape from Egypt? None of it supported by a shred of historical evidence.
     Oh, the ancient Egyptians were there. The mummy of the pharaoh in Exodus, Ramses II, is on display in Cairo. As are the pyramids. Somebody built them. But the Egyptians who, like the Germans, were sticklers for documentation, are tellingly mum on this topic. The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is jammed with hieroglyphics recording everything from tax receipts to recipes for beer. But nothing about a certain people being let go through means miraculous or mundane.
     That said, it is generally accepted that the armies of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, really did lay siege to Jerusalem in 589 BC, culminating in the destruction of the city, as laid out in 2 Kings 25. Archeologists have found pottery shards, bronze arrowheads and distinctive jewelry, leading them to believe the invasion took place. Score one for the Bible.
     But even if it didn’t, even if those broken pots led scholars astray, the continual warfare over this patch of land can’t be denied. From Assyrians to Macedonians, Romans to Persians, Turks to Brits ... the list goes on and on.
     Which is a long way of explaining why I’m leaping to add my two cents about What Needs to Be Done about the latest bloodletting over Jerusalem and the area around it. Which puts me right in the swim of popular thought, because though loud, neither side has the faintest clue what to do next.

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"The stickiness will always remain."

     Never write in books.

     I certainly can't do it.  Underlining, highlighting, jotting notes in the margins, even folding over the corners of pages, it all seems immoral defacement, like spray-painting graffiti on a Roman temple or carving your name into an ancient oak tree. Galleys—those half-books sent out for review—yes, that's what they're for. They're disposable. Writing in them is like writing on a notepad. Text books too, since they by nature are meant to become dated and replaced by more up-to-date editions.
     We're speaking about physical books here, needless to say. While my wife consumes her continuous reading on a Kindle. But the habit never stuck with me. I'm sure it will, eventually.
     In the meantime. The challenge I have with paper books is, as a writer myself, is when I hit a phrase or thought that I might want to quote, or at least recall, at some later point. I've marked them with business cards, torn scraps, bits of string. Because if you don't, good luck remembering, never mind retrieving the tidbit that caught your interest.
     For the past two or three decades, I and everybody else has had an ideal solution to this problem, so can't let the death of Spencer Silver on May 8 go unremarked upon.
     Silver invented Post-it notes. Or rather, he discovered the not-that-sticky adhesive that led to them. A chemist for 3M, his given task was to concentrate on "creating a new superstrong adhesive." That's what he was supposed to do. What he ended up inventing was a superweak one. Which is a lesson right there. Because rather than sigh and abandon the failure, as most would, 3M set out to find a use for this new semi-sticky stuff, a process which, it is also important to note, took years. During that quest, Silver held seminars at 3M, brainstorming with coworkers about what purpose his not-at-all-super adhesive could have. One was attended by colleague Art Fry, who sang in the choir in a Presbyterian church, and knew how annoying it was when he opened his hymnal and the bits of paper marking his various cues and places would flutter to the floor. In 1974, he had his ah-ha moment.

     More years passed. It wasn't until 1980, a dozen years after Silver found the weak adhesive that didn't lose its gripping power when peeled off a surface, and didn't damage it, that 3M introduced Post-it Notes.

     And even then, they weren't an immediate hit. People had to be taught how to use them. 3M gave away a lot of freebies until people suddenly realized they are for, well, everything. I put one atop a clip I was sending this morning. No need for a paperclip, and nothing encourages brevity like writing on a space 2 x 1.5 inches.
     The ideal size. For me, the original 3 x 3 pads are too big—I'd end up tearing the sheets, to make each last longer. I scatter those tiny pads in every desk drawer, night table, end table and briefcase. I'll peel off 10 and use that thin chunk as a bookmark, peeling off sheets as I encounter the noteworthy, leaving them behind like bread crumbs, marking my way through the book. It's a great thing. Thank you, Spencer Silver. You can read the New York Times obit of him here.

    Although ... looking at the photo I chose to illustrate this, my well-thumbed copy of James Boswell's "Life of Johnson," I must point out an irony that would otherwise not be apparent. I prefer this edition of the great biography above all others because it alone, as far as I know, contains marginal notes by Johnson's friend, landlady, and, perhaps, sadomasochistic gal pal Hester Thrale Piozzi. The comments that she scribbled in her copy of Boswell's book, now at the Houghton Library at Harvard (and, from a different edition, in a private collection). My copy is a three-volume set published by The Heritage Press in 1963, and I recommend anyone tackling Boswell to seek it out, as Piozzi adds to the fun. She exclaims, "It is true, tho!" She denies. "Which Johnson never would have done." She elaborates, she ponders, she queries, and takes continual potshots at "Bozzy," whom she obviously despises. It's like having a comments section on a late 18th century work. So amend to my original edict: Never write in books. Unless you intimately know the subject at hand. Then go for it, if only for posterity's sake.

Mauldin urges us to always face the truth

Bill Mauldin

     “Who is Bill Mauldin?” reads lamppost banners outside the Monroe Building, where “Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin & the Art of War” opened Friday at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, 104 S. Michigan.
     A sad, almost a shocking question. But the truth, which he so revered, is that in 2021, Bill Mauldin’s name will evoke nothing to many, or else be a distant ping. If fame were doled out according to impact, Mauldin would stand today among the best-known Chicagoans.
     Alas, people forget.
     Mauldin not only changed how Americans viewed World War II but how we think about war and the military. At a time when the Army was presenting its shiniest spin, when a photo of an American casualty would never be seen in a newspaper, when cartoons about Army life were Sad Sack peeling potatoes, Mauldin created Willie and Joe, a pair of exhausted, bedraggled infantrymen flat on their bellies in the mud, hoping to live long enough to smoke another cigarette.
     Nor did his influence end on V-E Day. After the war that made him famous, Mauldin advocated liberal causes decades before they became common. Odds are, if you believe strongly in social justice, Mauldin was advocating your core principles before you were born. He was fighting for civil rights when Martin Luther King was a teenager, for gay rights in the mid-1970s. He wasn’t just a cartoonist but an artist, a Chicago artist.
     OK, “Chicago artist” might be a stretch. Mauldin lived most of his life in the Southwest, born in New Mexico, settled in Arizona. But in between, he came to Chicago for a key year to learn his art at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. And was an editorial cartoonist on staff at the Sun-Times for almost 30 years.

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When "batshit" just won't suffice.

  

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     

     Molly Jong-Fast first registered on my radar about a decade ago, when collecting quotes for "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the literary companion to recovery I was writing with Sara Bader. Jong-Fast had told the New York Times something typically concise and piquant about secrecy and recovery that fit right into our chapter about Alcoholics Anonymous.
     "It seems crazy that we can't just be out with it, in this day and age,"she said. "I don't want to have to hide my sobriety; it's the best thing about me."
     After the book came out, we started to occasionally communicate through Twitter. I saw her as a Manhattan wit ("loud, arch and snappishly funny" as the Guardian recently described her), heir to Dorothy Parker. I called her a couple times, when I needed a particularly incisive quote. She never let me down.
     Then Jong-Fast upped her game by joining forces with The Lincoln Project folks, a band of Republicans who never got the memo about the entire party groveling before the great orange godling, and decided to resist the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, no matter how completely their confreres submitted. After COVID locked everyone down, Jong-Fast started a Tuesday and Friday podcast with Rick Wilson, "The New Abnormal," which I recommend highly. It allows me to generally ignore the endless jaw-dropping mouse shriek of the post-Jan. 6, 2021 Republican Party, and instead keep tabs indirectly on important developments via the podcast, at a remove, second hand, filtered through smart, humane people who condense the ocean of bile and deliver it to me in significant drops. The New Abnormal is like the special smoked goggles used to view a solar eclipse: a way to contemplate a fiery phenomenon without burning your retinae or going blind.
     One challenge facing Jong-Fast as she boldly considers the current political hellscape is that it beggars language. If "crazy" seems apt to her when describing a culture where people are embarrassed to admit they're in recovery, what word could she use to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene? "Crazy" still fits, but it also seems a little inadequate without some kind of intensifier, and one of Jong-Fast's favorites is "batshit." "Batshit crazy"—she used the phrase three or four times in a single program last week.
     Which got me pondering about how Chiroptera guano got associated with madness. Etymology, like the GOP, is a nexus for mistaken amateurism, and online there is a common theory that "batshit" somehow devolved from the "bats in the belfry," an early 20th century trope to jocularly refer to lunacy.
     That strikes me as fanciful. Even "batty" only refers to batlike qualities in my Oxford English Dictionary. I would sooner lump "batshit" in with other "-shit" terms: apeshit, bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit. "Batshit," like much evocative slang, is thought to stem from the military. There's a wink at it in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 with the character "Col. 'Bat' Guano."
     As with "apeshit," (or the current GOP, for that matter) in its original usage, the "crazy" is implied. "Most of America's males were in Korea or World War II or I. They killed, and they aren't all going batshit," Lt. William Calley is quoted saying in the 1971 "Lieutenant Calley."
     I found the term as far back as the Fall, 1953 Carolina Quarterly, of all places, in Gabriel Boney's "Epiphany in E Flat." "A coarse voice answered sharply, 'Batshit!'"
     So "batshit crazy" is really a pleonasm—using more words than necessary, for effect. Like "cash money" or "tuna fish." So when did the redundancy, "batshit crazy," begin to be used? It seems to be a creature of the mid-1980s. I found it in the 1985 novel "Night Moves," by Walter Jon Williams:

     "I thought Harvey, the guy who was helping me, was batshit crazy."

      For an even older usage, all I have to do is look at the wall in my office closet, at a cartoon that I've long admired by P.S. Mueller that ran in The Chicago Reader in 1983. 

     "Full blown batshit crazy and still holding down a productive job." It spoke to me (and thanks to Jim Mueller, Pete Mueller's brother, a long ago regular reader who got me a signed print). 

     Allow me to offer Mueller's "full blown batshit crazy" as my thank-you gift to Molly Jong-Fast, to tuck away for when things in our country go from bad to worse, as they very well might. In a few years, when Matt Gaetz becomes the 2024 Republican nominee for president and Evangelicals guiltlessly dance around golden idols of Donald Trump, beating timbrels and buffing it with their long hair, when "batshit crazy" begins to seem, well, tepid, she'll be able to remember this and deploy the more powerful "full blown batshit crazy." What a sad day that will be.

     

Arkansas Notes: Another Tiny House

     Sometimes things are so obvious that you almost forget to say them. But Caren Jeskey is a rock. As you know, the heretofore Austin bureau chief is driving up from Texas to return to Chicago. But she paused while on the road to file this report, keeping her Lou Gehrig iron woman streak of never missing a post for more than a year now. A feat of consistency, endurance, professionalism and responsibility that I do not thank her enough for, despite how much I, and I know you, enjoy and appreciate it. So put your hands together, and let's applaud her those last hard miles home. Thanks Caren.

     Winslow Arkansas, population 398 in 2019. Why did I choose this as my second Airbnb stop heading to Chicago? Well, it boasted a beautiful view of a large pond nestled in the trees, a boat to paddle around, and endless hiking trails. A cabin in the mountainous woods with a wraparound porch. I was looking for outdoor adventure and it seemed the perfect spot. The host offered me a discount because I teach yoga. 
     The day I headed out to Arkansas, packing up the car heading out of Cooper Texas took about 3 hours longer than I realized it would. Thank you Dad for packing up the car so many millions of time throughout my youth. I had no idea it was quite so arduous. I got out of Cooper 90 minutes after check out time. I left it extra clean and even washed the sheets. 

     I could not help but stop a hundred times on my way to Winslow, even knowing it would be better to get settled in during the light of day. I sang “This Land Is Your Land” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” aloud to myself between long moments of silence along the way. I played Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Tom Petty (my guy, who I got to see in Dallas soon before his passing), Fleetwood Mac. I listened to the radio, and learned a lot about the healing powers of Water. Sometimes I found excellent classic rock and jammed out to the Steve Miller Band.
     I passed through the Pat Mayse Lake in Texas and then up to Hugo, Oklahoma where very apparently pot is legal. I did not get any since 1) I don’t generally imbibe and 2) not sure how Arkansas would feel about it.
     I found myself in the West Fork of the White River in Brentwood, Arkansas. Well well well. I’d just moved from the Brentwood neighborhood of Austin. What a small world. It was nice. I snaked along windy roads with signs that read “25 mph. 1,000 drops.” No matter how hard pickup trucks tailgated me, I honored the suggestions of how not to die.
     Shortly after dark I arrived at what I thought would be my digs for the week. I wound up a bumpy gravel road that became so narrow and twisty I was sure it could not be right; but thanks to GoogleMaps it was. I pulled Cosmica (my trusty steed, a dark blue Honda Civic) into the small driveway to my stone cottage home. I walked in and was overwhelmed with the strong odor of mold, mildew and perhaps cat piss. I was dismayed. I had some screen time with a group of friends and tried to play it up. I showed them around my dank quarters and they did not say much.

     I let them know it was time for me to rest, and said goodnight. I brushed my teeth, washed my face (the sink was very slow to drain), and climbed into the bed of the master bedroom with attached bath. As I lay there, in the dark woods of Arkansas, I told myself I could breathe just fine. But I could not. The odors were overwhelming. I tried to open the heavy screen on the door to the deck but it slammed down. I opened what windows I could. Usually with bad odors you get used to them. Not tonight. The acridity burned my nasal passages. I’d seen some wet kibble on the rug when I arrived; perhaps a raccoon had gotten in?
     After tossing and turning between small gasps of breath I finally decided to retire to the front bedroom. Perhaps that would be better. Alas, not so much.  I slept fitfully to a cacophony of unwelcome sounds. The bedroom door responded to wind gusts from the opened windows, creaking open and slamming shut a few times before I finally got up to prop it open. Aluminum roofing rattled in the wind just above my bed. A storm was brewing and there were a few guttural claps of thunder that I’m sure came from Beelzebub laughing at me.

     The hosts were lovely. They refunded my money and I found a tiny house in Farmington to retreat to. It’s proved to be a little piece of paradise. Cows and horses grazing in the fields, a big fluffy dog and gorgeous gray cat catching snuggles with me by the outdoor fire pit. I like it here.
     Farmington is about 17 minutes outside of Fayetteville where I sit now to write this post. Three men are sitting at the table next to me at Cheers, a restaurant built in a now defunct downtown post office. The grounds are gorgeously manicured. When I ask the guys what’s special about this particular valley, Pete S. (originally from St. Louis and transplanted here in 2009) says “it’s the Wicker Park of Arkansas.” Say no more, Pete. I am on my way.

Chicago’s less-than-favorite son could rise in Japan

 

    A dozen years ago, through a chain of circumstance too convoluted to relate, the U.S. government invited me to London to speak about Chicago at the Royal Festival Hall.
     Of course there had to be a welcoming reception at Winfield House, the Regent’s Park home of the American ambassador, a mansion whose 12-acre private grounds are the second largest in London, behind only Buckingham Palace. At one point in the evening, I found myself being given a tour of the mansion by Ambassador Lou Susman, a Chicago Citicorp executive who greased his slide into diplomacy by vigorous fundraising for the Democratic Party. His wife had decorated the vast Neo-Georgian interior with their collection of stark modern paintings. Rather jarringly, in my opinion, though I kept that to myself.
     “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and go to take a ....” umm, visit to the bathroom, Susman said. “And I look around and I think: ‘I’m just a Jewish kid from Pittsburgh.”
     That sense of awe at one’s lofty station in life is part of the appeal of ambassadorship. Susman certainly wasn’t rhapsodizing the joys of navigating Anglo-American relations, which began, remember, in revolution, include such dubious low points as the British burning the White House and America standing by while Hitler battered England. The 21st has gotten off to a rocky start, with both populations effectively joining hands and hurling ourselves off the cliff of nationalism and folly, Great Britain with Brexit, and America with you-know-who.
     The prospect of Rahm Emanuel becoming ambassador to Japan has gathered some attention — it was asked about at a White House press briefing on Thursday. Still, it might not happen — neither Emanuel nor the White House will confirm reports. Maybe it’s one of those famous trial balloons. Perhaps Rahm is jealous of the sickeningly sweet puff piece the New Yorker ran a few weeks ago about his brother, Ari, and ginned up some fictive good press of his own.
     Still, an apt time to ponder the question of why Rahm would be dispatched to Japan.

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Good riddance to blue and pink elephant

In addition to being too hot, too cold, too bright and too loud, the Thompson Center clashes terribly with its neighbors, such as City Hall, seen to the right in this unretouched photo.

     Timing is crucial in journalism. The story that explodes in your hand today might be a distant pop on the horizon if lobbed tomorrow. We saw that with the Adam Toledo case, where Eric Zorn was the first off the landing craft, offering a thoughtful, dispassionate column written just before the video became public, only to be cut apart in the crossfire on Twitter. Two weeks later, Mark Brown hit the ground with a column defending the police officer that was even stronger, and whistled his way up the semi-secured beach. It's the difference between jamming your hand into a wasp's nest in June and doing so in January.  Same hand, same jam, the only difference being the key presence or absence of wasps.
     With the State of Illinois putting the Thompson Center on the block last week, on Saturday I licked my chops and set aside my English muffin expose. I've long looked askance at the salmon-and-blue monstrosity, and began whetting my knife and hacking the topic into tasty chunks, a process I completed Sunday morning, turning it in about 10 a.m. with a self-satisfied smirk.  I felt a little frisson of guilt for vivisecting the man along with his work, but Helmut Jahn is a big boy, I thought. He could take it. 

    Actually, he couldn't. Not anymore. My editor, who begins her days scanning the actual news, replied, in essence. "Ummm, maybe you should factor in that Jahn died yesterday afternoon in a bike accident."
     Ah. Did not know that. No column was ever yanked back quicker or with more gratitude. I took a breath, spun around 180 degrees, and wrote the tribute that ran in Monday's paper—also sincere, working in some of the same criticisms, but with the head-bowed gravity the moment demanded. If you haven't read that, do so, and compare the tone with this, the original column that got yanked back; now, 96 hours later, I feel semi-comfortable sharing it here, after a respectful interval and in the more limited confines of the blog, without the imprimatur of the paper. 

     Besides, with Jahn's death throwing fuel on the dying embers of efforts to save the Thompson Center—I'm not sure how that changes anything—it is even more timely to outline the case for taking it down and putting a proper building in its place.  

     This is unsettling. The Thompson Center, that is. Not because it is for sale and probably will be torn down. Good riddance to bad design.
     A few murmurs of dissent from sentimentalists. The Thompson Center is architecturally redundant, since its model, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, whose 22-story lobby ... choosing my words carefully...inspired Helmut Jahn to create his star-crossed homage, is right where it has been since 1967 and not going anywhere.. No need to grieve over a knock-off when the original still stands.
     The hunchbacked beast of a building never fell from favor, since it was one of those rare structures despised from the start.
     “It’s obscene,” Chicago architect Harry Weese said at its 1985 unveiling. “It won’t even make a beautiful ruin.”
     True that. But it did make a quick one. Within a year, its shoddy outdoor pillars, obviously not intended to be touched by human hands, were already “dented, scraped and smudged.”
     Even the workmen who built the Thompson Center hated the thing. “This is an ugly building” one scrawled in graffiti, 17 stories up.
     So the building going bye-bye isn’t what irks me. That’s a good thing. What bothers me is that its demise will mean that my career has bracketed the building. You start to feel old when you outlast public buildings, particularly one 25 years younger than yourself. When the State of Illinois Center, as it was originally called, was built, I was a hustling young reporter. One of the few people who actually gazed upon the Ice Cube—prominent among the SOIC’s raft of design flaws was this Rube Goldberg system that formed ice at night, when the electricity rates are low, and then blew air over the ice, cooling the building. In theory.
     In unforgiving reality, the contraption never worked, particularly since the glass curtain wall served as a greenhouse—to Jahn’s surprise, apparently, though how he managed to fail to consider that blazing object in the sky is a mystery. Ignoring the sun, like ignoring gravity, is not the hallmark of great architecture. There was talk of special glass that was supposed to be installed but proved too costly and was jettisoned. The heat overwhelmed the cooling system, requiring them to both cover the inferior glass with jury-rigged anti-sun sheeting and retrofit in a normal air conditioner. And that was only the beginning. I could fill the column with problems. You couldn’t turn off the lights—programmed by computers, supposedly “energy-efficient,” they left tenants who wanted to dim their offices, say to project slides, to tape black paper over the light fixtures.
     To be fair, there was unquestionable pride in the early years. I would march visitors into the SOIC, shout “Tah-dah!” and we’d just stand there, open-mouthed, watching the glass elevators go up and down—yet another flaw, since so many tourists would jam the elevators that employees couldn’t get to work. And of course, we had the luxury of gawping then leaving. “Scandalously short on user comfort,” is how Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp politely put it. Too hot, too cold, too loud. When the frequent public events were going on below, one state employee said it “sounded like a basketball game was going on outside my office,”
     And that was before the state, in a penny-wise-pound-foolish public display of false economy, allowed the whole thing to decay and deteriorate into a grubby, crumbling mess, so bad that—and I saw this with my own eyes—the carpet in the governor’s office was repaired with duct tape. As were the broken tiles in the plaza outside. When Gov. Pritzker said it would take $375 million just to clean and repair the place, nobody even blinked at the figure. Sounds right.
     There is one argument for its preservation that I feel duty-bound to float. You could view the Thompson Center as a crime scene, making the building itself evidence. Before the wrecking ball takes the Thompson Center down, we could have the show trial right there in the yawning lobby, the way its namesake held public hearings there for accused rapist Gary Dotson (to this day the most memorable moment in the buildings 36 year history, itself reason aplenty to take it down). Think of the drama, setting up a courtroom where the grids of cheap sunglasses and chola hats are usually on sale, next to the big static displays from the DMV and the Treasurer’s Office. There would be Helmut Jahn in the dock, scowling fiercely, in chains. After the evidence is provided, and inevitable guilt concluded, I would feel comfortable arguing for mitigation. Yes, Jahn was 40 when it was unveiled, but that’s babyhood for architects. We could write it off as youthful indiscretion, committed at a time when big hair and padded shoulders eroded our aesthetic reason. The Thompson Center atrocity is mitigated by Jahn’s subsequent good works: Terminal One at O’Hare, the Mansueto Library at University of Chicago. A simple apology would do. Not that this is possible—Jahn has already cheekily written a treatise explaining how he would like to retrofit, yet again, the disaster he inflicted on the city.
     Here’s a thought. If you design a building whose workers had to set up fans and umbrellas seeking relief from the sun cruelly blazing through the giant magnifying glass you put over their heads, at least have the dignity to just shut up and let exasperated Chicagoans finally give your folly the bum’s rush it deserves.