Cat warrior

 

Hsiao Bi-khim on the Chicago River.

    A wolf and a cat are born on the same day. The wolf pup is much bigger, maybe a pound at birth. The kitten, closer to four ounces. But they roll and tumble, playmates if not friends.
     Time passes. Both grow. The wolf becomes 150 pounds. The cat, 10. The wolf is sharp-eyed, fierce and hungry, looking for its next meal. The cat is anxious, constantly trying to keep from ending up in the wolf’s belly.
     Welcome to the China-Taiwan relationship, circa 2021. Both nations were founded at the same time, in the late 1940s. Taiwan was never part of Communist China. But China insists Taiwan is its possession anyway and wants it, eventually.
     Communist China is much, much bigger: 1.3 billion people over 3.705 million square miles. Taiwan has 23 million people on almost 14,000 square miles, or less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the area of China.
     Which leads to the question of why China is so keen to snap it up, even though doing so would plunge the global economy into chaos? And the answer is: because they’re China, growing in power and aggression, keen to claim everything it thinks is its due, Hong Kong was returned from Britain and is being brutally suppressed.
     Next on the agenda is Taiwan, which it describes as a “renegade province.” Trouble is brewing. On Friday, the Chinese sent 38 warplanes into Taiwanese air defense zone. The whole flap over the United States selling submarines to Australia is about keeping China from gobbling up its neighbors.
      Trying to keep a distracted world aware, if not exactly focused, on their delicate situation is a continuing task for Taiwan. That’s what brought Hsiao Bi-khim, the Taiwanese representative to the United States, to Chicago last week, and how we ended up sitting in the prow of Chicago’s First Lady, politely balancing paper plates of deep dish pizza that neither of us wanted on our knees, and talking international relations as the glittering riverfront skyscrapers slid by.

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Flashback 1990: The grant's tomb—MacArthur money `ruins lives'

"The Voyage of Life: Childhood," by Thomas Cole (Smithsonian Institution)

     The MacArthur Foundation Fellowships were given out last week—they'd rather not call them "genius grants" though everybody does. This year was unusual because, among the unfamiliar poets and filmmakers was somebody I actually had talked to, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Princeton professor whose insights lent my 2020 COVID Easter article what spine and acuity it displayed. 

     But that was merely foreshadowing. Now it turns out that the MacArthur Foundation is a possible benefactor for the Sun-Times. Which is very cool. Not just because they're Chicago-based, and support vital institutions (do the syllogism: A: The MacArthur Foundation supports worthy organizations; B: The MacArthur Foundation supports the Sun-Times and C: The Sun-Times, ergo, is an worthy organization).

     They also had a reaction that I've admired for decades, trotting out when speaking to public relations groups. I was the charities, foundations and private social services reporter for a couple years. After the first year, celebrating the genius grant winners as they were led blinking into the light, batik artists and interpretive dancers and such, I had this thought: "I bet those awards ruin people's lives" and set out to find them. After I had corralled a number, I approached MacArthur for their reaction. Nine organizations out of 10 would have curled into a defensive ball if a reporter shared that thesis. The MacArthur Foundation didn't. I don't want to ski ahead of my tips, but just the prospect of having them in our corner is thrilling.

     Andrew McGuire, an injury prevention expert who got a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in July, 1985, said having the $40,000 yearly payments stop this year was "like going off heroin."

     James McPherson, an acclaimed fiction writer, never published another story after he won a MacArthur grant in June, 1981. "It pretty much ruined his life," said a colleague.
     Despite hoopla surrounding the annual no-strings-attached "genius" grants, which can be worth as much as $375,000, the award can be risky for the ego. Artists, activists, writers or scientists who find themselves abruptly handed a huge bundle of cash and sudden fame sometimes show negative effects.
     "There are a number of reasons people might feel it ruined their lives," said William Cronon, an associate professor of history at Yale University, who won a MacArthur worth $164,000 in July, 1985. "Prestige is an issue. Many MacArthur fellows resent the press description of it as a `genius' grant."
     MacArthur fellows such as Cronon are usually quick to point out that, even considering the negatives, receiving a MacArthur fellowship is a positive experience ("besides the teasing," McGuire adds).
     Still, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation is sensitive to the possibility of the awards having undesirable side effects.
     "There is some sort of curse: `May you be given everything you ask for,' " said Ken Hope, director of the MacArthur Fellowship program. He said that the sudden freedom to pursue long-delayed goals afforded by the MacArthur grant can sometimes be daunting.
     "There's a sense in which the gauntlet has been thrown down," he said, adding that the blaze of publicity accompanying the prize can cause problems.
     "Suddenly they become well-known," said Hope. "People get unwarranted calls from investment advisers, used car salesmen, proposals of marriage."
    Hope said that, from the beginning, the MacArthur Foundation has worried about how fellows will cope with the aftermath of the award.
     "There is a word `iatrogenesis' " said Hope. "It means `the harm caused by the doctor.' We have been aware of that word, and we try to be even more careful in the selection process."
     The most common problem expressed by MacArthur fellows is that the grant does not, in reality, give them extra time to pursue their dreams.
     "When I first got the fellowship, I assumed that it would would free me up from having to do my regular job—teaching—so I could do my writing," Cronon said. "But Yale has very strict rules about how much leave time a person can take. I received no leave time at all on the MacArthur. So, in one direct sense, it gave me nothing but extra money in the bank account."
     "Ours was a small department and I didn't feel I could leave," said J. Richard Steffy, about to retire as professor of nautical archeology at Texas A&M University.
     However, he said that if not for the $288,000 grant, "perhaps I wouldn't have retired this soon."
     Even though Cronon's free time did not increase, he said he was still expected to be more productive by his friends and co-workers.
     "There is this sense that colleagues have if you have a MacArthur felowship that you've been doing nothing but working on your projects for five years, so why haven't you produced more books?" he said. "That's a negative side."
     McPherson, now a teacher at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, is off the scale as a unique worst-case scenario. He called the $192,000 grant "an extra dose of misery" and blamed the award for causing him to lose custody of his daughter.
     "I was going through a divorce when I got the award, and I was trying to get joint custody of (my daughter) Rachel," he said. "But the publicity surrounding the award caused all kinds of people to come out with extreme jealousy. The judge gave my ex-wife extraordinary alimony based on the award. I think I would have gotten my joint custody if I hadn't been chosen at that moment. . . . I have to fly every month to see her. That was what the award did to me."
     Far more common is the experience of composer Ralph Shapey, who called the $288,000 MacArthur fellowship he received in 1982 "definitely a good thing."
     Shapey said that the grant had almost no effect on his working life—perhaps the grant allowed him to buy an expensive musical score he otherwise would have passed up—and he ended up socking away the money in a bank.
     "You can write just as good music on a full stomach or a hungry stomach," he said. "I create because I have to create. It's something that I have to do, and something like money is not going to stop me."

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 1990

Ravenswood Notes: Cool Monks

Two Monks in Contemplation in a Forest, by Carl Baron von Vittinghoff (Met)

     I'm tempted to put a trigger alert atop Caren Jeskey's report today. Any of us who have ever had an awkward encounter in a restaurant, or made a remark that we thought would be knowingly chuckled at and instead got us dragged to the curb and set out with the trash, socially, will relate, if not shudder. Which has to be just about everyone. But these difficult social knots can be undone, and understanding can be reached, if one persists, as you will see.

 

     My father met me for breakfast one morning this week, before I started my workday. I picked the place, Pastores. It was a treat to see the back of his head as he sat at a table waiting for me, as I walked west on Leland towards Lincoln. (This could not have happened over the last 7 years when I lived in Texas).
     We settled in for frittatas, kale and avocado smoothies, and Intelligentsia java. The clamor of garbage trucks and the occasional Brown Line train reminded us where we were. Pastores offers tasty fare, exceedingly friendly staff, and vibrant murals if you happen to venture indoors to use the restroom.
     As we sipped our coffee and waited for the food, our peace was disturbed by an aggressive voice bellowing loudly at the patio patrons. My head instinctively whipped around to see an older model convertible sedan with its oversized passenger window wide open. A tattooed, buzz-cut person’s upper body practically hung out of the window. This person had somehow decided that yelling “have a beautiful day” at us was a good idea.
     It was jarring.
     I stood up to water a tree with the water I wasn’t going to drink (a regular practice of mine) and commented aloud to my patio neighbors “I wish I was that high at 9:30 in the morning.” I was met with horrified stares by two young, hip people and one solo man who sat at one of the tables nearby. I realized they were thinking “oh, that Karen.” They would not deign to make eye contact, nor crack a smile in my direction, or acknowledge me in any way, shape or form. I was the annoying, white, middle aged lady who clearly doesn’t deserve their attention. Then I realized that they were sharing knowing smiles and laughs with another “cool person” sitting at the table next to them, and they all joined ranks to school me. “Maybe she's just happy? Maybe she just wanted to share some joy?” I simply sat back down.

     Alas, the solo guy with the ironic tee shirt and slouchy jeans was not letting it go. We were sitting back to back, his table, just behind ours, and he let me know just how terrible I was. “We don’t know if she was on drugs.” I resisted saying “how do you know they’re a she?” He continued. “I don’t like to make assumptions about people.” I half-turned and said “you’re right. I’m sorry. I should not have said that.” He kept going. I couldn’t really hear what he was saying as he rambled on in my direction, but the tone was obvious. I was a dumb person and he was not.
     I finally turned towards him and said “I was startled. I said I was sorry. You’re right, it’s best not to falsely accuse others.” That did not stop him and he continued on a diatribe of how one should give benefit of the doubt to others.
     I saw it differently. I felt that the person in the car wanted to disrupt our patio sit, and they did seem high. Or angry. Or mentally unwell. Or some variation. I said (not sure why I thought I’d end up having a civil discourse with this person) “I am a mental health professional and I do care about others, but I felt uncomfortable.” His response? “My wife is a psychologist.” I wish I’d said “so do you mansplain to her too?” 
     I finally got the sense to shut it down by saying “I am getting back to my meal now,” and I did.
    My father and I didn’t talk about what had happened. I was trying to refocus on having a good meal with Pops. It was tough though, since I felt that I had said something callous, was called on it, and then was not allowed to receive forgiveness, even when I apologized.
     The reason I feel I was being callous is I try to live by the motto “support, don’t punish.” I don’t feel that drug users are scum. They are people who are suffering. I don’t feel that angry, possibly mentally ill people should be name-called either. That’s not who I am.
     The hip kids and the solo man were right in some ways. It’s not OK to accuse someone of using drugs, without evidence. It’s also not OK to try to draw others into my worldview, especially these days. It may be important to mention that they were all brown people. I was the glaring white Karen.
     The solo man then loudly told the waitress that he wanted to move inside, which I took as a further affront.
Before we left, I decided to try to make peace with Mr. Solo. On my way out of the restroom I stopped at his table, and repair we did. I generally succeed in reconciling with others by using authenticity with a dose of humility. He apologized, and so did I. His name is Pete. I told him that I can imagine things must be stressful for his wife, since those of us in the field of mental health counseling have a lot on our plates this year. He thanked me. I told him “it’s nice meeting you.” He was disarmed, smiled, said “you too." He also explained that he had moved inside to join a Zoom meeting, not because he was trying to get away from me. And we parted ways.
      Getting along with others these days seems to be a battle. As I wrote this piece from a table next to a wide open window at Bar Roma on Clark, I vowed not to talk to the two men next to me because 1) I was focused and 2) I’m a little gun shy. But they were wrapping things up, and I got a very good vibe from them, so I took a chance. First we talked food. It’s quite delicious here.
     Although he was in fashionable street clothes, I guessed that one of them was a monk. He was. I guessed the other was from a “cool religion” since he reminded me of plenty of folks I’ve come across in Chicago over the years. Kind, warm, grounded, religious, and not preachy. I was right. He’d been a hospital chaplain and is now a hospital administrator. Turns out we have some friends in common.

      He’s from Medellín Columbia, and was a Benedictine Monk from 2006-2017 in Aurora, Illinois. He moved to Chicago in 2016 and has been working for the Archdiocese ever since.
     I asked him about the topic of his sermon last Sunday. I was raised Catholic and (though I am not religious now) I often appreciated the wisdom of the pastors. He shared that in his sermon he appealed to his parish to get vaccinated. He used a Biblical story about a person who was creating miracles who was not religious, and was outside of the church. His message? Dr. Fauci and other science-based experts are offering the miracle of the vaccine, so trust it. Get it.
     I’m so glad I took the leap and decided to connect with my neighbors. They may not all like me, we may not all get along, but sometimes a gem in the form of a former Benedictine monk turned very cool Chicagoan appears. For that, I am grateful.

 

A man walks into a sex toy shop...

Searah Deysach in her store, Early to Bed, 5044 N. Clark. 

     Searah Deysach doesn’t rush up to a customer entering her shop. She likes to hang back, give them time.
     “We find that if you immediately approach somebody, they shut off,” she said. So she waits before circling over to ask, “Do you need help finding anything? Do you have questions?”
     They often do.
     Early to Bed, 5044 N. Clark, in Andersonville is a noteworthy establishment for two reasons. First, it just marked its 20th anniversary. That caught my attention. A milestone for any small specialty store.
     And second, it sells sex toys. Not many stores do that. A visit seemed in order.
     Alas, much of Early to Bed’s colorful stock defies description in a family newspaper. “Probe-y things and ball-shaped things and tickle-y things and twisty things,” is how Deysach put it. Often a single object will suggest an entire sub-realm of heretofore unimagined—at least by me—human psychology, such as the eight inch silicon squid tentacle.
     “These are all rechargeable vibrators,” says Deysach, giving a tour of the store. “And then over here, we have a lot of vibrators that are battery operated, and then wand style vibrators.”
     What prompts a person to start a sex toy shop?
     “It wasn’t something I set out to do,” said Deysach, 48, who “just made up” her first name, Searah, in seventh grade. “So many Sarahs in middle school,” she said. “I was searching for my unique identity.”
     Like any other good businessperson, she saw a need. She started her store for the simple reason that shopping for sex toys wasn’t the fun it ought to be.
     “Not to shade any other other stores, but it was not the warm, fun, exciting experience I thought shopping for sex toys would be.” she said. “I had more than one experience where I felt unsupported. It was awkward, uncomfortable, disappointing. I felt shamed by people working in these stores. That was the ‘aha’ moment. I thought, ‘This is ridiculous: stores that sell these products are staffed by people who make you feel terrible for wanting the products in these stores.”
     The seed money came from her mother.
     “Nobody gives a sex toy store a business loan,” she said. Credit card companies charge her more, insurance companies have dropped her when they realize her line of business, and she can’t advertise on Facebook. The reason is clear.
     “One hundred percent prudery,” she says.

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"This one is just for the blog," I said.

Read the Picayune Sentinel

Eric Zorn, a firebrand considered too dangerous by the sprites at DePaul's newspaper to be allowed
on campus, at the finest radio station to ever grace the airwaves of Chicago, WBEZ. 

     So it's Thursday morning, which means the Picayune Sentinel arrives in my inbox. The PS is Eric Zorn's newsletter, begun after the Chicago Tribune columnist sewed his salary into the lining of his coat and quietly slipped across the border into Substack, just as Alden Capital tightened its grip the Trib and started requiring that columnists show their papers.
     In it, once you get past the jokey stuff at the top, Zorn calls out the DePaul student publication, the DePaulia, for thundering against his planned inclusion in Wednesday's panel discussion, “Tough Times for Local Journalism.” They denounce Zorn for his "racist views" over Adam Toledo, the 13-year-old shot and killed by a police officer in an alley last March, and insist that such a person not be allowed to soil the campus with his presence.
     Eric's column, if you recall, basically said, "Let's wait until the video comes out before we form judgments as to what happened." That is not racism in the usual meaning of the word, a term which gets expanded by some people, particularly the young, to include, well, just about anything they don't like. What the column did do, I felt at the time, was lack the necessary head-ducking, ass-covering, self-protective, read-the-room gear that columnists sadly must shift into to avoid such accusations. It wasn't timid enough—a frequent problem of Zorn's, I must add. The worst that could be said was it lacked the cooing bear hug sympathy that the precise moment called for. It was as if his neighbor's house were burning down, and Eric sidled over to the family, wrapped in blankets, numbly watching the flames, and wondered aloud, "Did ya have working smoke detectors? Were the batteries fresh?" Which is an excellent point—smoke detectors are so important. Perhaps not the moment to bring it up, though I don't believe that doing so should make a man a pariah, like Lord Jim, moving from port to port to escape his shame. 
     I admire Eric for expending the mental energy on DePaul's craven retreat from everything an institution of higher learning is supposed to represent, using their supposed sensitivity to the downtrodden as an excuse to tread down on people like Eric Zorn, a writer who was fighting vigorously and eloquently for a wide range of social justice issues long before the staff of the DePaulia were being toweled off in a delivery room and piercing the air with their first cries of aggrieved arrival.
     Me, I wouldn't bother. I'd just shrug—whaddaya expect from a bunch of babies?—and invoke the truism, "The reason debates in academia are so bitter is because the stakes are so low" then move on. As with ignorance proudly displayed on Facebook, if I responded to shameful self-own cancellations at colleges and universities, it's all I'd ever do. But that feels irresponsible in this situation, as it will be a sad day when the fingers-in-your-ears, I-can't-hear-you-you're-not-there self-imposed purdah of the Right becomes equally common on the Left. Assuming we aren't at that moment already. If Eric Zorn is too toxic a voice to be heard at DePaul, then they truly have retreated into the nursery, and welcome only those who tiptoe in, tickle their tummies—whoops, ask permission to tickle their tummies, certify consent, and only then do so, murmuring soothing words—before tiptoeing out again.
     Anyway, I know I already posted something today—a two-decade old piece of self-indulgence that barely held my own interest, and it's about me. But I've been meaning to draw attention to Eric's welcome emerging from the ashes of the Tribune to spread his crystalline wings and fly off into the heady stratosphere of independent commentary, and today seemed as good a time as any. Make sure to subscribe to the Picayune Sentinel so you get it every Thursday morning, as I do.

Reader Flashback, 2002: Where Is the Love?

      Friday is the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Reader. I'm proud that I wrote for spunky free weekly quite often in the 1990s. There were the two years of my monthly BobWatch column, which many readers remember fondly, and an even longer run of True Books, an idea that I carried over from the National Lampoon when it folded. I would also place columns that had gotten spiked at the Sun-Times into the Reader, like Swiss Gold and The Plumber's Dream. Most newspaper columnists hate to have their work rejected. To me it was a bonus payday.

     The Reader also had lots of advertisements, back in the day, which meant they needed a lot of copy to go around them. The Reader was sort of famous for printing these huge, honking articles, like this one, written about my biggest flop, "Don't Give Up the Ship." If it is an imposition upon the patience of the reader well, there was a lot of that going on at the time.

    Harry W. Schwartz was empty. Oh, the books were there, fresh and smart on the shelves in the large, upscale bookstore in a strip mall in Milwaukee. The salespeople were there, eager, friendly, eyes twinkling with bookish goodwill. And I was there, hungover, wearing a sports coat.

     They were ready for me. Posters of the cover of my new book, Don’t Give Up the Ship, were in the window, along with stacks of the book. More books were piled on tables in the front of the store, and an array of empty chairs waited for the one thing that was missing: customers.
     Not only was nobody there for my reading on a pleasant evening last June (“It was in the Journal Sentinel,” the manager said apologetically), but there was nobody in the store at all. Not a soul, no one I could stare at, draw over with my tractor beam. I looked at all those books. Seed corn, I thought dolefully, cast on rock.
     Writing is a constant struggle to avoid cliches–half the battle is striking out stock phrases like “half the battle”–so it’s fitting that the agony of a bookstore humiliation doesn’t even have the benefit of being unique. Every author goes through one, or many.
     This sure wasn’t the first time for me. I had endured similar ordeals with previous books–that reading in Tacoma that Doubleday had scheduled during the Mariners-Indians playoff game at the Kingdome. The time at the Barnes & Noble on Diversey when they had me read to the people in the coffee shop. When I opened my mouth they looked up, as one, annoyed to have been interrupted by some jerk at a podium, then dropped their noses back down into organic chemistry and guides to cheap hotels in Paris, while I stammered and flop-sweated.
     But those were exceptions for books that did reasonably well. The same book that drew nobody in Tacoma sold 247 copies at an author’s luncheon in a ballroom at the Phoenician in Scottsdale. The nightmare on Diversey was for a book excerpted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear…
     This most recent book, however, was an entirely new level of disaster. And the thing is, I had tried to avoid it. My father, a retired scientist, had been writing his memoirs, as many retired guys do, about his days as a radio operator in the merchant marine in the 1950s. He wanted me to help him, and I, recognizing a nightmare in the making, said no. We never went camping or fished or took in a baseball game, how could we attempt something as complex as writing a book together?
     “No” didn’t satisfy him, however, and he kept harping on this memoir of his, and I kept saying no until he finally mentioned that the ship he’d been on was still operating, taking cadets from the State University of New York Maritime College across the Atlantic each summer on a training cruise. Something clicked for me–we would take the ship to Europe together, have an adventure. I would use the time to interview him about his life, then present his story, filtered through me, sandwiched into a father-and-son odyssey. It would be fun. He was reluctant, but I talked him into it and we went. It wasn’t fun. We fought like cats in a bag. I wrote what I thought was a gentled-up version of what happened.
     Reviewers ignored the book utterly, magazines coughed into their fists and turned away, and all the while my father stormed and protested and denounced, a Greek chorus bursting out of the telephone, damning me and celebrating the book’s failure. I never knew, when the phone rang, whether it would be him, proclaiming once again how my book was a vindictive lie, or my mother, happily informing me that there were a few copies at the Boulder Book Store but that she’d hidden them behind other books. Or my sister, weeping that I had betrayed the family in a story about the book in the Chicago Jewish News by referring to our upbringing as “assimilated.”

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‘The news is all lies anyway’

     George Orwell was an optimist. As bleak as “1984” is to read, his cautionary tale against totalitarianism makes an assumption about people that, almost 75 years after its writing, has proven an unrealistically generous take on human nature.
     The novel is remembered for telescreens, the system of constant surveillance necessary to enforce the party line, and “Big Brother is watching you!” But it is also about the link between oppression and lies. Its hero, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth writing lies, specifically rewriting old news stories so they jibe with the current political pieties. Disgraced party members must be edited out. When the eternal enemy shifts from Eastasia to Eurasia, history must be revised. Orwell suggested people need to be forced to accept lies, and that they will care if those lies are contradicted in news accounts and text books.
     Turns out, they don’t. Not judging from Donald Trump and the Republican Party. In their protracted war against truth, they don’t bother altering the past. People will edit reality themselves. The continual lies pouring out of Trump’s mouth—does the media still count them, with a certain idiot gravity, or have we finally given up?— are just taken automatically as gospel, a refinement of totalitarianism George Orwell never dreamed of. Nobody has to do it for them. They volunteer.
     This week, the so-called “full forensic audit” run by Trump’s Arizona allies showed that Joe Biden won by more votes than he was initially credited with.
     “Truth is truth, numbers are numbers,” said Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, sharing the news.
     To some. For now.
     In “1984,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and that sure works for Trump, who didn’t bother trying to dismiss the Arizona report. He didn’t say it is unreliable because it was performed by his amateur supporters. No, Trump simply pretended that the report offers vindication, and any suggestion otherwise is not to be believed because it comes from the media.

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