"The best mailman ever"

    The suburbs get a bad rap, as a bland neutered nowheres devoid of the charm and crackle of the city. You don't hear that as much post-COVID. And while there is some truth to it — nothing radiates silence and emptiness like a deserted suburban street — there are also human hearts beating outside the boundaries of Chicago. There are people living here too. We too leave our mark, sometimes.

     For instance, my wife and I were wandering downtown Northbrook — a few blocks from our house — and we walked down Church Street, a bit off our beaten track. We noticed an improbable sight: a bronze mail bag on a metal bench at the corner of Church and Chapel, in front of what used to be Hope Union Church, now the offices of the Northbrook Historical Society.
     I'm believe we've seen it before, years ago. And driven past it many times unnoticing. But cars blind us to the details of life. And time effaces. We read the plaque. "In loving memory of Rudy Alex Loosa," it began. "Mailman extraordinaire on Northbrook Route 8 from 1997 - 2017. Rudy dedicated his life to his faith, family and friends and was a true gift to our neighborhood. Sit down, relax, and remember his contagious smile and share his love for all!"
     We sat down — you kind of have to. We relaxed, just for a minute, soaking in the beautiful early spring Saturday. long enough for our own red-bearded postman to come by, his boxy white truck parked directly across the road. It would look trite in a movie. I thought of yelling something. "Nice tribute to your fallen comrade!" Or some such thing. But that didn't feel right, he didn't look in our direction, and I decided not to stay this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

Rudy Alex Loosa

     I draped my right arm over the warm bronze mailbag, and we studied the details. Beautifully wrought. Someone put a lot of time and money into this. Somebody or group of somebodies cared, a lot.     

      The music from the arts festival in the park wafted over on the soft May breeze, and we got up and headed over to look at the artists' booths.
     Back at home, some details seemed in order. Loosa died in 2017, while delivering mail, at age 59. "Beloved Northbrook mail carrier dies on job" is the headline on the Tribune story.
      "He was the quintessential mailman some of us remember from 1950s television, where everybody knew the mailman, knew the milkman, and they knew about you and your family, knew about your losses, your celebrations, your victories," Scott Cawley told Irv Leavitt. "There was always a smile on his face and a great sense of optimism."

     He would deliver holiday cards to his customers, introducing himself, telling them how much he appreciated them.

     There just aren't enough people like that. I'm certainly not one. After I read about Loosa, I was sorry I hadn't said something to our mailman, passing right there. Our only communication is my ritual call of "Sorry!" when Kitty barks at him — she isn't a barky dog, but she's taken an unusual emity to the mailman, as dogs sometimes do. Maybe next time.

Flashback 1994: "Drug Sentencing: The Law of Unintended Consequences"

     A friend is hosting a party for Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner on Monday night, and I plan to go and meet the great man. If we actually get the chance to speak, I'll have to suppress the urge to say, "I wrote a cover story for you once." Technically true though the story, if I recall, was part of a package that was on the cover. Close enough.

     Anyway, I remember being vastly impressed with myself to be writing it — serious journalism for a national publication! My relationship with Rolling Stone began after they excerpted my pranks book, and I began writing stories for their college section. It was when magazines sent writers places, and I once had to fly to Boston to cover a story, returning that night, and it felt very on-the-edge to get on a plane without luggage. 

      I thought this piece was the beginning of being a Rolling Stone writer in earnest, though it actually was the end, the last piece I wrote for them — Wenner was unhappy with it somehow, though I can't recall the details.  I sure hope he doesn't. Probably best not to mention it. 

     Mandatory minimum sentences are still imposed in about half of federal drug cases.

     Tonya Denise Drake, a 28-year-old mother of four, mailed a package for a man she met in a parking lot, earning $47.40 and a 10-year jail sentence. Jason Cohn, 19, was sentenced to a decade in jail for shipping 12 grams of blotter paper containing LSD for a fellow Deadhead who, unknown to Cohn, had been busted by the feds. Michael Irish, a 44-year-old carpenter from Portland, Ore., spent three hours helping to unload hashish from a truck and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Keith Edwards, 19, sold crack cocaine to a federal informant, who then set up four more buys to accumulate enough crack to qualify Edwards for the 10-year sentence he is now serving.

     A decade into our nation’s most recent infatuation with mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession, the horror stories continue to pile up. In 1993, 60 percent of the 87,000 people in federal prisons were serving time on drug convictions, up from 22 percent in 1980. Like Drake, Cohn, Irish and Edwards, half of these prisoners were first-time offenders. Had they chosen to rob a bank or rape someone or even murder someone, their sentences would probably be less than the mandatory no-parole sentences Congress has been writing into law since 1984.
     Nor are mandatory minimum sentences limited to the federal government. Forty-nine states have their own mandatory laws, such as Michigan’s “650 Lifer” law, which requires life sentences for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine. In that state, some 150 people are sitting in prison for life for cocaine possession, perhaps half of them first offenders like Gary Fannon Jr., now 25 and seven years into the life sentence he got for a drug transaction that he merely helped to arrange. (See RS 638 and RS 664.)
     Compulsory drug sentencing is kept alive by fear-mongering. After creating the first set of harsh mandatory-drug-sentencing laws, the infamous Boggs Act, in the 1950s, then repealing them as unworkable in 1970, Congress plunged back into mandatory minimums with the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Since then, stiffening or adding to the mandatory minimums has been an election-year ritual, with the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 and the 1990 crime bill. The 1992 crime bill died at the end of the congressional session only because of the gun-control controversy.

     New to her job, Attorney General Janet Reno appeared to have taken a position on mandatory minimums based on common sense and experience. Unwisely, she spoke up: “We are not going to solve the crime problem by sending everyone to prison for as long as we can get them there and throwing away the key.” Apparently chastened by the administration, she has backed off. Her office now insists: “Attorney General Reno never was against mandatory minimum sentences. She said we need to look at them and determine who they’re affecting. She is still saying the same exact thing.”
     President Clinton declined an invitation to talk to Rolling Stone on mandatory minimums, and members of the Senate and House judiciary committees, fearful of being called soft on crime, tend to be reluctant to discuss the subject publicly. Of 10 key members polled for their opinion for this article, only Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responded. “He’s recognized the problem of inflexibility when dealing with drug cases,” a spokesman said. “He’s willing to try to give the judges some measure of flexibility. The problem is, people can’t agree on a definition.”

To continue reading, click here.

‘A little extra artillery’

     Why did Jordan Eldridge, of Michigan City, Indiana, submit to a series of 20 injections in a part of his anatomy where most men would never want even one?
     He considers before answering.
    “Well ...” the 33-year-old landscaper began. “I guess it’s just part of the culture. Bigger is better. I never really had too much of a problem in the bedroom. I have had a girlfriend tell me my johnson was small before. But it was an argument. You have to take it with a grain of salt.”
     I’ve always thought penile enhancement is invariably some variety of scam.
    “Historically, you’ve got to be careful what is out there,” agreed Dr. Jagan Kansal, a board-certified urologist in Chicago who specializes in sexual and reproductive medicine. His practice, Down There Urology, performed the PhalloFILL procedure on Eldridge. “There are a lot of advertisements promising you take a pill and your penis is going to get bigger. Oral medications won’t do that.”
     Eldridge said he did not do it for romantic reasons.
     “I asked my girlfriend that I was with currently, and she said, ‘No, I don’t think you need to do it.’”
     Then why?
     “It’s more of a personal thing,” he said. “You know, guys in the locker room. Everybody takes a glance, and you don’t want to be the smallest guy. Don’t want to be the biggest, but it never hurts to have a little bit more.”
     PhalloFILL does not make the penis longer — Kansal says no reputable procedure promises that — but wider. Eldridge received shots of a substance called hyaluronic acid filler, a natural compound found in body joints.

To continue reading, click here.

The future is always murky

     "I imagine cards will go first," my wife said, giving the card she had just opened several little punctuating shakes as she spoke.

     Wednesday. Her birthday morning. She had opened her card, affixed atop a present, given the requisite ooo's and ah's for its beauty and aptness, then boom, straight to the effect of artificial intelligence on the the communication industry. 
     By "cards will go first" she meant that algorithms will replace the teams of wordsmiths and artists laboring for Hallmark and such. I didn't have to ask for elaboration. Cards have different types — the humorous, the artistic, the poetic, the affectionate. I had opted for the beautiful. The product of humans, but that can change. Scan enough cards in and let the code do the rest. Words and pictures. She didn't add, "With newspaper columns shortly thereafter." She didn't have to.

     The media has been pounding the What-Will-AI-Do? drum furiously for months. I tend to ignore it, because when I roll up my sleeves and read one it turns out, like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, that there is no there there.
     I abandon the cautionary essays unmoved. My take on the AI menace remains the same. It's hard enough to get people to act like people and fulfill their full creative potential. Machines do it wrong, slightly, and when it comes to something like a greeting card — or a newspaper column — even a slight wrong is a lot. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.

     Besides, there will be no AI writing newspaper columns because the demand will die long before they get good at it. I haven't yet gotten an email from a reader demanding, "Who ARE you and why are you telling us about your life?" But that moment approaches day by day. Hatters kept trying to make cheaper hats when the problem was that men no longer felt like wearing them.
     That said, I'm reluctant to predict the future, as the guys who called cell phones a fad in 1983. (They might be. When was the last time you talked on the phone? Phones could yet end up like compact discs, a change that showed up, seemed permanent, and then years went by and it wasn't. Which makes sense. Nothing is permanent).
     The model I use is my youth in the 1960s, when the space program carbonized our brains. Tang was big. So were "Space Food Sticks," a sort of bland, mushy Tootsie-Roll-like concoction. Someday we would all enjoy entire meals in the form of a single pill.
     Or not. Turns out people liked preparing real food, or at least eating real food. I ate TV dinners all the time as a child — that pair of hot dogs in their shallow sea of beans. Mmm! Now I never do. If my wife came home and I served her a Hungry Man dinner her reaction would be comparable to if I served a pair of roasted hamsters.
     My hunch is that people want to read cards or stories, view paintings or hear songs created by other people. That readers will never curl up with some book churned out by a robot. Maybe I'm wrong. People do read boilerplate thrillers churned out by anonymous writers pretending to be a certain best-selling author . Maybe AI-created works will be fantastic in some unimaginably wonderful way, and my suggesting otherwise is like scoffing that someone would attend the opera without a top hat. The future is always murky.

Weighing ‘the soul of Chicago’

Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin

     “The soul of Chicago.”
     An easy enough phrase to toss out. It’s emblazoned on Willie Wilson T-shirts: “Restoring the Soul of Chicago.” Only $31.67.
     Brand new mayor Brandon Johnson also invoked the soul of Chicago, in his inauguration address Monday, repeatedly, seriously. So it seems worthy of serious consideration.
     What is the soul of Chicago?
     Johnson began his exploration by suggesting the soul of Chicago is a general human condition, like opposable thumbs. The soul of Chicago, he said, is “alive and well in each and every one of us here today.”
     Unless he meant just the people in the room. I hope he wasn’t implying that the soul of Chicago is a thing possessed only by those who’d go out of their way to see him inaugurated in person. If that’s the case, it’s going to be a long four years.
     Besides, Johnson immediately opened the category up to “the Miami, the Sauk, the Potawatomi, who lived on this land for centuries.”
     Hmmm. I see how mentioning Native Americans helps Johnson check off a box. But the Potawatomi war-danced out of town in 1835. A proud heritage, for certain. But if they are the soul of Chicago, today, then why are all these buildings here? I don’t think Johnson is saying the true heart of Chicago is the dispossessed, the exiled. The city does sometimes seem headed in that direction. I hope the soul of Chicago isn’t something that gets driven to Arizona.

To continue reading, click here.

Mailbag

     Readers often write in with questions and I do my best to answer them. This is from Ed Perchess:

     Neil, how is it ok for you the Left to say and do all you can against the so called Right but when the Right goes after the Left it is Wrong? It’s called Hypocrisy, which Liberal Regressive Socialists are full of, besides themselves!! Shame on you, ask for a refund from wherever you were brainwashed at. You are nothing but court jesters to entertain your elite.

     I did my best to answer honestly:

     Gosh Ed, none of this is complicated. Let me explain again: Donald Trump is a fascist, doing all he can to pull down America's democratic ideals. He opposes free elections, obviously. He opposes free media. He opposes freedom of religion, in forcing arcane sexual mores on women. Which makes you, forgive me for pointing it out, the dupe of a fascist, either consciously or unconsciously undermining American values in your own small way. Patriotic Democrats can do all we can to oppose you because we love America, in its pure, small "d" democratic form. You do all you can to prop up your sad and ridiculous demagogue because those taken in by shams eventually become invested in the fraud they have fallen for and can't face the truth.
     I hope that clears things up for you.

    Neil

King’s life just won’t stay in the past

     I don’t like to write in books. Even bound galleys — it just feels wrong. Besides, you still have to later find the page where the underlined passage appears. Better to slap a Post-It note by the parts you want to recall later.
     So when I pulled down my advance copy of Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life,” which comes out Tuesday, I smiled. The pages sprout with magenta and orange notes. It’s been five months since I read it, before the King holiday last January. While I knew the book was interesting, I forgot just how interesting.
     So interesting that I don’t even have to check the citations to immediately remember riveting details, such as that for the first 20 years of his life he went by “Mike King.” That one fact alone might unsettle your entire view of what being Martin Luther King Jr. must have been like. Not the young preacher, waiting for the greatness he knew was coming. But just Mike, just a regular guy, maybe more sensitive than most, who threw himself out of a second floor window when his grandmother died. Twice.
     A man deeply flawed — he bit his nails, liked to play pool, liked to drink. King had a habit of plagiarizing, in school, in speeches and later books. He cheated in writing, and he cheated on his wife.
     Not a particularly flattering portrait of King, except for the civil rights part. Yet one being celebrated as the new standard King biography.
     “Magnificent,” wrote the Economist.
     “The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation” wrote the Washington Post.
     Why? Because life is messy. And those who keep alive King’s dream of a country where people are judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, know this must be done by facing reality, not concocting self-flattering mythologies.
     “Great men,” Eig writes, quoting Emerson, “have not been boasters and buffoons.”

To continue reading, click here.