Who was the first president to visit Chicago?

No, it wasn't Abraham Lincoln

     When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, in the first wave of nauseating shock, my immediate, unfiltered thought was perhaps a strange one: Now he’s always going to be on presidential placemats. You know, those laminated arrays of placid white male faces peering out from oval frames: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump.
     You can never unring that bell. Schoolchildren 100 years from now, assuming we still have a country, an increasingly shaky bet, will look at his leering orange visage and be presented the chirpy, sanitized tale that kids always get: Donald Trump, American Hero.
     Today being Presidents’ Day, it seemed appropriate to wonder if the White House has been so besmirched by a man utterly unfit for the office that the usual American affection and interest for presidents is gone. Did Donald Trump break the presidency? Who cares anymore about Washington’s false teeth or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stamp collection?
     (Though the story of FDR’s postal scandal is dear to my heart. Just like Trump larding the government with lackeys, FDR picked a croney, James Farley, as postmaster general. In the knee jerk currying of favor that defined politics, then and now, Farley pulled a few sheets of the 1933 Mother’s Day stamp off the presses before they had been gummed or perforated and gave one to his philatelist boss, never pausing to consider he was creating hugely valuable philatelic rarity. Word spread, outrage ensued, and the post office figured out an ingenious fix: issuing sheets of ungummed, imperforate stamps, making the president’s private boon available to all).
     See, that’s the thing about presidential history. It draws you in. The simplest question isn’t so simple.
     For instance: Who was the first president to visit Chicago?
     Go ahead, plug that query into Google. Nothing, right? Random stuff.

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O Canada.

     I never suspected there were stupid people in Canada. Smug, yes. Passive-aggressive? Certainly.
    But the kind of towel-biting, conspiracy spewing, chest-thumping, fact-deprived, fantasy-dwelling dumbasses that jam every diner in America? Well, that's a new discovery. Their knowledge might be skewed toward the various flaws and misdeeds of the great vibrant democracy on their southern border. But they were generally up on the way the world worked.
     My fault. Of course ignorance is a universal. The quality that makes us human, really. You don't see many truly stupid animals. No squirrel could last long with the skewed, bullets-cannot-harm-me worldview that people approach COVID with. "That fox can't hurt me, it's just fake ne...."
     I don't know why it took me until now to realize this, to grasp that there are idiotic Canadians too. The anti-COVID restriction truck drivers and their anti-masker allies, have been parading around Ottawa (sigh, the capital of our frosty neighbor to the North) for weeks already. And just now are being driven off the streets of Ottawa (east or west of Chicago? Close to Seattle? Or Maine? You have no idea, right?) and are finally being driven back into their holes.
     I ignored them, both because everything that happens in Canada is so easily ignored, particularly in Ottawa (near far more familiar Montreal, or about 775 miles northeast of Chicago, or 440 miles due north of New York City) and the world political scene is so crazed and random that focusing on any particular lunacy seems overkill. We're fucked, the irresistible gears of history are turning, grinding our country into a miserable powder of screwedness, what's for lunch?
     But Saturday afternoon I was coming from Buffalo Grove, where my parents now live, and couldn't help notice a knot of protesters on the corner of Milwaukee and Dundee, waving heretofore unimaginable mash-ups of the American and Canadian flags. An echo of an echo, the nutsoid anti-COVID movement in the United States, bouncing into Canada, and now bouncing back.

    It reminded me of the mini-rallies that Trump supporters used to hold on the corner of Shermer and Walters, to harangue passing cars and manifest themselves. Trump denied the significance of COVID, initially, to try to get himself re-elected, because of his worldview where acknowledging anything bad is weakness, and even though now he has tried to walk that back, it's too late. Denialism as a political belief has escaped the lab and infected half the country.

     Wearing masks is a bother. Boo-fucking hoo. The dynamic active elder lifestyle community where my parents now reside requires masks. And temperature checks. Which I happily consent to because a) I'm not an asshole; b) I don't want to kill somebody's grandmother and c) it requires almost no thought or effort.
     There is something almost funny that people who are otherwise busy trying to kneecap elections, throttle the media, pull down American democracy and install a strongman in the former of Loser L. McLoser get all frantic over the prospect of being asked to save their lives with a vaccine, or somebody else's with a cotton mask, the wearing of which interferes with your personal freedom to a lesser extent than wearing pants does. It's gotten so bad that now Canadians, in all their decency, have begun acting like Americans—a charge I level in the full knowledge of just how profound an insult they will consider that to be.
     No matter. Insults are now the air we breathe, drawing condemnation of ourselves into our lungs, expelling denunciations of others. It's both immensely worrying and strangely freeing to us in the words-on-paper business. None of it really matters, does it? It's like we're providing play-by-play commentary to a forest fire.

Timeless Notes: Fathers

     I've been thinking about Shel Silverstein lately. The United States Postal Service is issuing a stamp in his honor later this year.     

     He's one of those Chicago writers who seldom make the casting call of Chicago literary talent, even though he was born here, grew up in Logan Square and went to the University of Illinois. He started writing and drawing for Playboy, living here until success hit and the moved, quite prudently, to a houseboat in Sausalito.

     Silverstein should be on the list, "The Giving Tree," featured on the stamp, certainly having as much impact on our culture as "Humboldt's Gift." He was an amazingly broad talent: he also wrote "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash, and deserves some hoopla in his hometown to go along with this stamp.
     But our Saturday correspondent, Caren Jeskey, beat me to the punch, at least with the opening quote to today's report, which I've delayed your reading too long already. Here it is:

I cannot go to school today!"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue
It might be instamatic flu
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke
I'm sure that my left leg is broke
My hip hurts when I move my chin
My belly button's caving in
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained
My 'pendix pains each time it rains
My nose is cold, my toes are numb
I have a sliver in my thumb
My neck is stiff, my spine is weak
I hardly whisper when I speak
My tongue is filling up my mouth
I think my hair is falling out
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight
My temperature is 108
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear
There's a hole inside my ear
I have a hangnail, and my heart is... what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is Saturday? Ha-ha
G'bye, I'm goin' out to play”
— from "Sick" by Shel Silverstein

     Long gone are the days when I played sick to get out of an exam at school. I’ve barely been able to get off of the couch for weeks after an exhausting move, then the flu. I can’t wait to be well again. I am hoping I’ll be able to get out and play this weekend, maybe even today.
     These days, typical stressors can feel like a lot more to contend with than they used to. We don’t have room to process normal life phases right now. Even though a pandemic was inevitable, we are dealing with collective shock and grief. The texture of our lives has been altered. Life stages and aging cannot be sufficiently processed with the angst and pain of a bigger demon on our tails.

     Enter the gifts of the humanities, and of our own imaginations and memories to get us out of this mess.
     The original Whip In opened in 1986 and was a cozy, wood paneled convenience store with a small bar and restaurant with red vinyl booths that served generous portions of aromatic, authentic Indian food. It’s on a major interstate, I35 (the most terrifying Indy 500 wannabe thoroughfare I’ve ever travelled save Chicago’s current incarnation of the Dan Ryan), in Austin Texas.
     I stumbled upon it several years ago before it was sold (and sadly rearranged but that’s another story). The long side of the L-shaped bar boasted tap after tap of crafty beers, some brewed in house. The short side had just a handful of stools, wine on tap, and several shelves of cheap to fancy wines.
      I ordered some food and a glass of red wine. It was impossible not to notice the dapper chap sitting at the other end of the small bar. He was dark haired and grizzled in a handsome cowboy way. He wore a white fedora and it didn’t take me long to realize that it was James McMurtry, Larry’s son.
     His body language said Keep Out, and so I did. I chatted a bit with the barkeep, and very quietly told him that I was dying inside a little, one of my favorite songsters a few feet away. I’d been known to sell James’ music to my friends with “he’s one of the greatest living American poets!” And who can not dance to Choctaw Bingo?
     I once listened to James’ "Complicated Game" driving east down rural highways to a work training in College Station. In his music, I felt the southern blues in my bones as deep as Chicago and Gary steel mill rusty melancholy. Amidst the stark pain of dreams deferred and the longing sensitivity of an artist’s soul, James is witty and funny. When he strums his guitars they are an extension of the rest of his sentient being. He’s a joy to behold through the airwaves and even more so in person.
     The barkeep took the matters into his mains compétentes. “James! My friend Caren here is drinking the same wine you are!” An eye cautiously looked up at me from under the white felted hat. “Hmm, you don’t say?” Within a short time James had moved a few stools closer until there was just one in between us.
     I sat very still, having wooed a forest creature into trusting me. A woman came up and let him know “the boar sausage is in the freezer and ready for you to pick up!” James was pleased by this news. He generously regaled me with a tale about his recent wild boar hunting expedition with his crossbow.
     Here I was, the mythical McMurtry family the reality of my life.
     I’m not sure what prompted it, but suddenly James was telling me a long story. I dared not look straight at him, for fear of ruining the moment. I soaked up his gravelly voice in my left ear. As I recall, the story involved a saloon owner who, during the Gold Rush, travelled from town to town opening establishments in booming towns. When the area dried up, he’d pack up and move the gig to the next hot spot, sticking his sign into the dusty ground, tiny town after town, as he travelled.
     James said something about the moral of the story, and it was not something simple about industriousness. Maybe one day that memory will come back to me. I hope so.
     The story was told to him by his father,  Larry McMurtry who we sadly lost last year. (I think it’s a book too, but haven’t been able to find it yet. If you know, please let me know). It registered that James McMurtry just shared, in detail, one of his father’s magical fantasies with me. Time stood still. No amount of money can buy the most valuable things in life. James commented “oh. I reckon I just spoiled the story for you.” I assured him that he had not.

P.J. O’Rourke, scribe of a franker time

     When I wrote this, it never occurred to me that the Sun-Times would refuse to print the offensive way that O'Rourke described a Korean political rally back in 1988. But we wouldn't. Respecting that decision, I won't share it here either. I realize that my bosses are just trying to protect me from being run out of town on a rail, a quivering ball of tar and feathers. Neither of us want that, and better safe than sorry. 

     Though you can be too safe, which is also a sorry situation. Nobody writes in to complain about that, so perhaps I should. This is an example of something we can think of as "N-Word Creep," where banning one word as being too disturbing to be mentioned in any context ever leads to other words receiving the same banishment, because it's the path of least resistance. I guess that's also why you can't guess "wench" or "slave" on Wordle. The danger is that you do it enough and it becomes, not a sign of enlightenment and consideration, but condescension and timidity. Maybe that day has already arrived. The bottom line is, I don't set newspaper policy, I follow it, sometimes grudgingly.

     Every time another 1960s musician dies, Facebook keens with grief. Tears spatter Twitter, as people clutch at their hearts, decrying this latest loss.
     And if the departed are in any way famous — say, Michael Nesmith of The Monkees — a process I call “The Full Diana” starts up, wheezing like a circus calliope, with the stacked teddy bears and cellophane-wrapped flowers.
     “Save it for somebody you love,” I mutter.
     Sitting at Denver Airport Tuesday, waiting for my flight home, I saw that P.J. O’Rourke had died. I felt ... well “sad” is overstating the case. “Sorry” is more accurate. I was thinking of him just last week, wondering what became of the arch, edgy humorist, so big in his day, and whether it might be worth tracking him down for a chat. Too late now.
     Even “sorry” is too strong. “Grateful” might be more to the point. Not grateful he is dead, of course. But that he lived, and wrote, amusing millions while inspiring an army of lesser talents such as myself. He was frank and fearless.
     When I got home, I went to the bookshelf and pulled down my O’Rourke books. “Parliament of Whores,” his keelhauling of the U.S. government, begins, “What is this oozing behemoth, this fibrous tumor, this monster of power and expense hatched from the simple human desire for civic order?”
     Did I mention he was a Republican? He was.
     My favorite of his 20 or so books is “Republican Party Animal,” containing the delightfully titled, “Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West,” one of those delicious assignments freelancers once dreamt about:

     “Ferrari North America, which is based in Montvale, New Jersey, had a 308GTS that needed to be delivered to Los Angeles by January 2, to be featured in a movie. Ferrari called Car and Driver and asked if they’d like to assign someone to drive it across the country. Car and Driver was good enough to ask me, and of course I said yes.”

     Though a member of the media — he was “international correspondent” for Rolling Stone; the title initially something of a joke — O’Rourke could be critical of the press. With good reason. I just waded through two long obituaries, in The New York Times and the Washington Post. Neither mentioned his most relevant story, “Seoul Brothers,” a report on the South Korean presidential election in 1988.

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Sharing Wordle scores: "This is all madness."

"Random Word Machine," by Daniel Faust
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     People despise Facebook. And rightly so, as an addictive time sink, a gigantic 24-hour carnival of triviality and pathos and malice that they can neither abandon nor embrace. A cheap simulacrum of life and the world that keeps them from experiencing the real thing. 
     I get that.
     Myself, I kinda like it, as a curated 5,000 member shock troop of readers, as a source of ideas—I often learn the news, not from publications such as mine, but from snippets people post. Now that we don't gather in public anymore, Facebook delivers the zeitgeist, the tone of culture, at least those clustered around me. 

     Then there is my own life, served back at me from a decade ago.
     "Don't do anything reckless," I told Ross a dozen years ago, when he was in his mid-teens and heading downstate for an overnight chess tournament, the precious memory preserved in amber like a paleolithic wasp.
     "What do you mean?" he asked, guileless.
     "Don't open with anything other than your king or queen's pawn," I sputtered, improvising.
     "What about the Sicilian?" he answered, sailing beyond my chess knowledge.
     I shared that with the public. Some readers fill their page with Bible quotes, or real estate listings, or trite memes. Which is their right. I would never dream of objecting. "What's all this about your wife being in heaven? Heaven is an artificial human construct. Ludicrous, really, in its..."
     So it surprises me to see the pushback directed at Wordle, the popular little game where you have six guesses to nail a five-letter word. There is a button that lets you post your score—not the mystery word itself, which is the same for all players every day, but the colored boxes reflecting how accurate your series of guessed words was. 

    I post my score, because dozens of people then comment. They have a Wordle party on my Facebook page. I posted Wednesday's score with the remark, "Nailed it in three." All sorts of people chimed in: from my college roommate's mother to director Bob Falls.
     Most comments were along the lines of this:
     "Took me 5. I just couldn't pull it together!" wrote Joe O'Connor.

     It doesn't seem the sort of stuff to annoy people. But it does, big time. Forty-six people commented on my Feb. 12 score, including this, from Joe Lenord:

     "This is all madness to me and I refuse to be a follower."

     The classic refrain of all the objectors, which is curious, given the actual madness going on, and what people are clearly willing to follow. Their objections reminded me of the Chicagoans-don't-put-ketchup-on-hot-dogs trope, which of course is not a culinary debate at all, but a parody of the sneering you-don't-belong-here exclusion that our tribal city used to feel comfortable projecting at anybody arriving on the block uninvited, now preserved as this very odd, ritualized condiment scruple.

     In that spirit, given what an enormous wildfire Facebook represents, it is very human that public ire would be directed at the five-minute commitment required by Wordle. Yet "madness" is the word people frequently use. 

     "Feel free to play, but for G-d sakes please STOP sharing this madness!" Bruce L. wrote on Wednesday's post, setting off an interesting exchange.
     "How about people stop getting so upset about it?" I replied. "You don't hear me complaining about golf."
     "Because we’re not posting about our golf game!" Bruce riposted. "Yet 20% of our feeds these days are people posting this silliness... That’s why you hear complaints..."
     "I'm confused," I wrote. "Are Worlde scores any more trivial than baby photos or what somebody ate for lunch today?
     That drew a lengthy, thoughtful exegesis from Bruce:

     "Yes Neil Steinberg, Wordle scores are infinitely more trivial than baby pics and modestly more trivial than food pics..."And again, we’re not posting our golf scores, our Scrabble results, our bowling scores, or our completed NYT Sunday crossword puzzles...
     Why do so many people feel the need to share their Wordle scores? I guess that’s the part the rest of us are confused about... Why do Wordle players think that other people care, yet nobody else seems to share any of their scores from those other trivial activities...
     Go ahead and play and enjoy! But why the need to share? Unless the ulterior motive is to clear out your friends list because you know so many people hate it and will stop following you... in that case, you may just be a genius! ."  

     While I do need to periodically thin the herd, that isn't my intention.  I replied:

     That's easy. Because they can. Wordle gives you a button to paste the score to your clipboard, for easy posting to social media. I guarantee if there were a button next to the handle on your toilet, posting your efforts online, Facebook would be crammed with those photos. So perhaps gratitude is in order; worse is no doubt coming.

    Even as I typed that, it occurred to me that my reasoning was doing more to bolster his argument than mine. I try to be able to be persuaded; it's my superpower. I'm sure the blush will go off both the playing and the posting of Wordle. New baubles will appear to distract us with their shine. Until then, if anybody should be bitching about Wordle, it should be me. The column I wrote about Wordle drew two comments when I posted it on Facebook Feb. 9. My Wordle score for that day drew 38.

Saying goodbye to Colorado

     When I think of my wife's amazing ability to prepare for complicated situations, I remember her getting our apartment ready for children more than a quarter of a century ago. Not just gathering baby furniture and hiring a consultant to go through the place and point out unprotected electrical outlets, but laying in all manner of necessary supplies.
     In one flash of recollection, I idly reach over to a table and pick up a large bag of cotton balls.
     "Cotton balls?" I inquire idly of my very pregnant wife, holding up the white puffy bag. "What do we need cotton balls for?"
     The next moment it's 3 a.m. and I'm pressing the baby, squirming and howling, gainst my shoulder with one hand while the other reaches out in her direction, fingers waggling frantically. "Quick!" I cry. "Give me a cotton ball!"
     Although I still don't know what the cotton balls were for. To dab something, no doubt. Or administer some kind of ointment. Forgetting the specifics being part of the amnesia process that allows second children to come into the world.
     Anyway, last Thursday we arrived in Colorado to shut down and pack up my parents' home after 35 years and my wife shocked me, and I imagine my parents, by striding in, saying hello and not ... as I would have done, left to my own devices ... making tea and small talk and playing Scrabble, or going to the Pearl Street Mall to browse the hip boutiques, or wandering down the trails that begin practically in their back yard. 

     Instead she promptly mobilized everybody, hands flying while issuing instructions that somehow never came across as orders, while we all busied to the task at hand, into getting the million things done that needed to get done before before the movers showed up Monday morning.

     Groping for a way to convey what she had done, I came up with General Eisenhower planning Operation Overlord.

     "Operation Overlord?" she asked.

     "D-Day," I explained. 
     So passed Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a blur of busyness, building boxes, wadding up newspapers, filling bags of garbage, hauling them out to the dumpster. My little brother was a superstar, in business meetings much of the day but still shouldering the burden in a way that amazed me. He also popped for a lux lunch at Japango at a key moment, keeping us all from going insane. My mother was coaxed into making decisions: keep this, get rid of that, and did so with a minimum of sentiment and a maximum of what can only be described as courage. My father gradually perceived that a change was in the works. 

     "I'm going to miss this house," he announced one morning, surprising us all. "It's been a good house." So he was on board with the move, at least for the moment.
     Now it was Monday morning, and my task was a simple one: get my parents out of the way for a few hours. Otherwise my mother would captivate and charm the moving crew, and the hours that were supposed to be dedicated to loading the truck would instead be spent sitting at her feet, fingers laced around their knees, raptly listening to her sing, "Embraceable You."
     First breakfast at Tangerine, complete with a pair of mimosas for them to celebrate their new life in Chicago. I surprised myself by ordering the vegetarian hash (when in Rome) served on a bed of pumpkin puree. My mother, true to form, chatted with a young lady at the next table about the tattoos on her upper leg. Penguins? No, the ghosts from "Beetlejuice."
     But even lingering, breakfast took less than an hour. So Plan B was in order.
     "I wouldn't mind a good picture of the Flatirons," I told my mother as we got in the car afterward. She directed me this way and that, driving past gorgeous Victorian houses and construction sites, always too close, or the view blocked, I gamely took a few shots of the distinctive formations, which hove into their current position about 50 million years ago and symbolize the city of Boulder.

    Now what? Luckily she thought of friends who live a few miles out-of-town.
     "Let's go say goodbye!" I suggested, and we headed there. That was very nice, sitting in their lovely, enormous living room—her husband owns a big roofing company. I killed time telling stories until my mother cut my performance short ("You're giving a monologue," she said, curtly) and we returned to their home—for the past 34 years and the next five days—a few minutes after the movers left. (United Van Lines, by the way. Not just professional, but kind. Communicated thoroughly beforehand, always available, the process orderly and transparent. I felt I got to know Barbara and Bill. The crew arrived when they said they would. Pay the extra money. It's worth it)
       Tuesday, I had to run to Home Depot for more boxes—for stuff that wasn't being moved, but shipped to my sister in Dallas. At at a red light a block from their house, at the intersection of Valmont and Foothills Parkway, I looked over and realized the mountains were at the angle and lighting that struck me as characteristic of what I've been gazing at for the past 49 years, since I first came blinking in wonder to Colorado so my father could spend the summer working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. After all that chasing around, all I had to do was roll down the window and snap a picture. Though of course the Flatirons are too huge and impressive to be captured by anything as paltry as a photograph. A single shot and then the light turned green and I hurried on my way.

Why Russia is about to invade Ukraine

     Have you ever seen anything made in Russia? I don't mean an automobile or a toaster? I mean slacks. Or a steak knife.
     I bet you haven't. Russia doesn't even have a significant share of the vodka market. The United States exports more vodka than Russia. So does Sweden. And France.
     Ever wonder why that is? This is the nation that once known for its craftsmanship. Whose jewelers constructed those amazing Faberge eggs, the treasure of kings. The answer: because Russia is a failed state. Nearly a century of soul-crushing, initiative-dampening communism morphing into an organized crime kleptocracy. A totalitarian state reflecting the grain-of-sand soul of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB goon. Without natural gas they'd be even more impoverished than they already are.

     Its people are crushed down, cynical bitter. The result of living in an atmosphere of official lies. Something for Americans to look forward to, perhaps.
     Hence the pending Ukrainian invasion. Because everyone wants to be significant, or at least pretend to be, even nations screwed by themselves and history. They need to shine on the world stage, and aggression is the go-to move of the weak. Every 5th grade dimwit, every isolated octogenarian sputtering contempt at the others in the day room; constant criticism and knee jerk hostility is the language of the weak, oppression their philosophy, their religion. It's all they have left to feel important, powerful, alive. That's why the Republican Party, as it shifts into a totalitarian cult, has to conjure up imaginary weeping liberals and lap up their tears, an elixir to maintain their strength. Because otherwise they got nothing. And why they must be opposed. The only argument they understand is defeat, their natural condition.