He's never going away.

"Hell Hounds Rallying Round the Idol of France," by Thomas Rowlandson 
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      It's the whining that most exasperates me. Don't they ever tire of it? Yes, Donald Trump is famous for the lies that firehose out of his mouth, as easily as he draws breath and almost as often.
     But it's the constant complaining that drives me mad, if I didn't tune it out — I can't imagine watching Trump's interview this Wednesday with Tucker Carlson, his half-clever way of drawing whatever scant interest there might be away from the first Republican presidential debate, a gathering of gnats, all of whom, with the exception of born-again Chris Christie, can't even muster the internal fortitude to string together a few critical words against the liar and bully, fraud and traitor whom they would defeat.
     Republicans obviously want that kind of thing, though again, it boggles the mind as to why. It would be bad enough to gawp at the destruction of American democracy for a Julius Caesar. To yield your vote and the protection of a functioning judicial system in favor of Alexander the Great.
     But for this guy? That enormous baby, moaning and bellyaching. Waving a series of bogeymen over his head — mommy, Muslims are frightening me! Waaa, I can't sleep because trans people are using the toilet! Poor me! The deep state is hurting me! The world is rigged against me! It's unfaiiiiiir!!!!

     Remember, he was going on about the election being fixed in 2016, in case he lost. His squeaking past Hillary Clinton — but her emails! — shut that up, until 2020, when he actually did lose. Then the fig leaf he's slapped over every defeat he's ever experienced — the game was fixed, because that's the only way I can ever lose! — went from passing lie to an eternal, constantly-parroted verity of the Republican Party. Most Republicans believe, vis a vis nothing, that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. And yet they still participate in elections; you'd think, having been cheated in some ineffable way they can't explain, never mind prove, they'd give up on elections. And go straight to force and violence. Which is kinda where they are heading now.

     This is our new reality. Even when Trump passes from the scene — at 95, surrounded by toadies and handlers and mistresses and enablers — these mini-Trumps will ape him, trying to duplicate his success. At least when we die, and go to hell, we'll know exactly what to expect.

Vovomeena

     As a rule, I don't think much of slogans and truisms, particularly when offered in a commercial setting.

     However, this billboard, outside Vovomeena, the place where my son and I had breakfast in central Phoenix Friday morning, caught my fancy. Not an especially profound sentiment, perhaps. But true, and useful. Something to bear in mind, or try to, particularly as politics keep fracturing and the fate of our democracy teeters in the balance. I don't recall ever seeing it stated so plainly. You tend to want to feed stupid, mean, toxic people back their own stupidity, meanness  and toxicity— that seems like justice. But it really only brings you down to their level. Besides, they're better at it. They've had more practice. Believe me, as a newspaper columnist, I've often had the experience of responding instinctively to some base abuse, wait for the reaction, and realize that, duh, once again I've been out-stupided by an idiot.
     Maybe having just tucked into an excellent breakfast made me in a more receptive mood. The service was first rate, the setting, relaxed and lovely. Being on vacation, I indulged in a $19.95 smoked pork chop, sitting on a homemade waffle topped with apple-maple syrup and a layer of scrambled eggs and accompanied by a Portuguese donut. (The unusual name of the restaurant, Vovomeena, is a tribute to owner D.J. Fernandes' grandmother; "vovó" is Portuguese for "grandmother" and his is named "Meena."). 

    A lot of food, and I left behind a good deal of the eggs and waffle. But ate every bit of that pork chop, which was juicy and delicious. Breakfast held me all day — lunch was a whole grapefruit supplemented by a package of dried fruit and nuts from Starbucks, plus a cranberry juice cocktail on the plane. I'll admit, Phoenix as a city did not immediately impart its charms to me — maybe my second visit this winter will unbox those. But Phoenicians, as they are indeed called,  sure know how to serve food. Every single meal was a treat.

There's a really good smoked pork chop hiding under all that.

The freedom to say, "Stick 'em up!"

    Let's say I rob a bank. Nothing fancy. Nylon stocking over my head. Gun in my hand. Rush up to the window, point the gun at the trembling teller and say, "Stick 'em up! Gimme all the money."
     At which point I'm immediately arrested, as criminals often are. They're not geniuses, very stable or otherwise. Quite dumb really. An off-duty cop, in line behind me, makes the nab. I'm cuffed, led away.
     At my trial, my lawyer arises and airily begins my defense: "The First Amendment is the bedrock of our American freedoms. Take it away, and the rest of our quality of life crumbles. As free citizens, we are within our rights to make all sorts of statements: 'Down with the government!' or 'We need a new constitution' or 'Gimme all the money!' How sad a day it would be, when a simple imperative sentence considered against the law. Not eloquent, perhaps, not fully formed 'Give me all of the money, please,' we might prefer. But still a statement of entreaty, a request, one that no man should be prosecuted over...."
     How well would that argument go over?
     Not well, I'd imagine. Not in a world of sanity and fairness which, sad to say, we seem to be slipping away from.
     Because there are Donald Trump's lawyers, trying to frame his alleged plot to overthrow American democracy as a free speech issue. These were legitimate questions being asked by a responsible leader. A polite inquiry into the election process.
      "It attacks his ability to advocate for a political position, which is covered under the First Amendment," Trump attorney John Lauro told PBS. A political position of pressuring individual election officials, one-on-one, to overturn the election, dozens of failed lawsuits, constant airing of claims he absolutely knew to be untrue ("You're too honest," Trump told Mike Pence).
     "All of that is protected speech."
     As with any conspiracy theory, he scrapes together a ragtag bag of allegations and innuendo, fantasy and prevarication, and presents them all as a cohesive whole.
     Is there a fraud who would not use that argument?
     "My client, your honor, is not the quack peddling Neil Steinberg's Cancer-B-Gone Elixer that the prosecution just described, but a man of honor, asking legitimate questions about the medical establishment and offering a possible cure in the form of his $100-a-bottle pyramid program, which is not the 'pathetic scheme' outlined in the charges, but a growing, promising field of legitimate research in the medical community, Wishfulfillmentarianism, where the natural, innate engines of gullibility within the psyche of the patient are harnessed to promote good health..."
     We'd laugh if any other cheap crook tried it. But when Donald Trump does the exact same thing, as much as we'd like to laugh, we can't. Because too many people take this idiocy seriously for it to be funny.

111 degrees in the shade

   

     To be honest, when I stepped out of the air conditioning of Sky Harbor International Airpot in Phoenix Wednesday morning, I expected to be hit with a red hot hammer. After all, this is the city being crushed by the full brunt of global warming, 31 consecutive days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That has to be brutal.
     Yes, it was only 103 at the time, about 11 a.m. I'd experienced hotter, and perhaps that was affecting my expectations, memories of that 105 degree day in 1995. Back then, I'd walked a block to the dry cleaners in East Lake View and immediately home to lie down, wrung out, spent.
     Six hours earlier, it had been 58 degrees when I'd walked the dog in the early morning cool of Center Ave. I'd considered wearing a jacket, but figured, "Enjoy it while you can."

     Stepping through the automatic airport doors, I even formed phrase, in my mind, just to be ready, "Jesus fucking Christ!" Or some such thing. It was on the tip of my tongue.
     Only the 103 degree heat was ... bearable. Not a shock at all. Dry heat, as they say and ... could it be? ... slightly balsam-scented. Phoenix smells like a hotel sauna.
     As the temperature rose, I went about my business. Delivering my younger son's cat (I can almost hear readers who learned their parenting skills watching "The Great Santini" lunging for their keyboards to lecture me about how I am a ruinously indulgent parent. Spare me; based on how my boys turned out, you don't have a leg to stand on. Off the charts).
     We swung by Phoenix's main drag, such as it is, and the Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse. Phoenix is depopulated at 12 noon. Hardly anyone on the street. At Home Depot, where I went to buy the lad the cordless electric drill that every householder should own (note to Great Santini set: shhhhhhh) groups of Hispanic men waited under trees. Day laborers, waiting for work. I bet the heat they feel is much different than the heat I shrugged off, dashing in and out of air conditioned cars and buildings. So let's stipulate that. I can only report what I experience; I'm not the all-seeing-eye.
     Phoenix reminds me of Los Angeles, not an actual city at all, in the Chicago, cohesive-place-with-a-downtown-and-neighborhoods, sense, but more of a random agglomeration of disparate locations united in a municipal totality. Streets of tiny ramshackle houses gave way instantly to the ballpark for the Diamondbacks. ("How do they play baseball in this?" I asked my son, and he pointed out that the field is covered and air conditioned, which seems wrong). The stadium yielded to a stretch of office buildings, then back to cement plants and flooring outlets, welding supply companies and yards of lawn statuary.
     I tried noting the colors of the buildings, but here words failed me — maybe it's the heat. There was red brown and copper brown and rose brown, khaki and beige and khaki beige, a spectral wheel of brown: dun brown and tan brown and brown brown, with the occasional bright yellow and faded red for variety's sake, with lots of old mustard and yesterday's oatmeal.  Blame the sun — I saw more cars whose paint jobs had been seared off in two days in Phoenix than seen in two years in Chicago.

      There are many junior and community colleges and trade schools. As we drove Interstate 17, heading to dinner, I began to notice all the billboards were for personal injury attorneys, but left off one salient detail — the lawyers' names. Instead they read "Husband & Wife Lawyer Team" and "Accidentjustice.com" and nicknames like "Sweet James" and "Rafi."

     My guess is their targets have limited English skills. Digging around, I found the Arizona Republic dedicated an episode of its Valley 101 podcast on this very subject. Like most podcasts, it's an incredibly slow-moving 22 minutes of time-filling and tap-dancing — including an eye-crossing number blast probing whether Arizona has more lawyer billboards than other states, beginning with the protracted story of how, in 1977, lawyers advertising became legal in Arizona. 

     The key question — why so many personal injury lawyer billboards compared to billboards for supermarkets and accountants and every other form of human endeavor? — wasn't raised, never mind answered.

     Though one lawyer interviewed on the Arizona Republic did say, "If you have any soul at all, you have to kinda hate lawyer advertising."

    Yes, but why? That was asked.

   "Why does it feel like we're surrounded by them?" host Kaila White wonders, calling Mark Breyer, who with his wife Alexis constitute, "The Husband and Wife Law Team." 

    "The reason is ... " Mark Breyer begins, promisingly, then says, in essence, they're trying to reach people. Stop the presses!

     "If anyone can be your client, then casting a wide net kinda makes sense," host White reveals.

      The obvious answer of why we notice them — because they're numerous and crude, with their stupid nicknames and sledgehammer get-cash-now tone — is finally hinted at, toward the very end of the podcast, after 22 minutes of life I'm never getting back.
     After lunch, it reached 111 degrees, and I retired to a chaise by the pool. It was warm, but not unbearable so. My biggest trouble was my eyes — running and smarting. Did I say it's a dry heat? It is. A very, very dry heat. 
      The biggest way the brutal Phoenix heat manifested itself was when I went to relocate from the lounge chair to the pool. I went to step onto the concrete and drew my bare foot back. Too hot to walk upon. I put on my flip-flops, and walked over to the stairs. The metal handrail was too hot to touch. I slipped off one sandal, then the other, and stepped into the water.  

     We ate well , and since readers do both live in  and occasionally visit Phoenix, I probably should go into detail. Lunch the first day was at the Welcome Diner at 10th and Pierce, where I had the "Carol" sandwich — smoked pork shoulder, Carolina BBQ sauce and tangy coleslaw on a fresh baked biscuit, with homemade lemonade and a slice of their hibiscus cherry piece 

     Dinner was a place my kid discovered because it's in a strip mall by the Goodwill, the lyrically named "Soup & Sausage." I tried kvass for the first time — think a rye bread soda, not sweet, almost like an NA beer, but dark. And a platter of pierogi — chicken, onion, and two sour cherry — a pair of well-crafted sausage, and a mound of sauerkraut.

      Dinner in Phoenix Thursday night was at Taco Boy's — as much as I sometimes lament a missing possessive, the presence here made me itch to ask the oldest person behind the counter if he were the Taco Boy, and to congratulate him on his grammar. But the place was hopping, and I thought better than to bother anybody. The food hot of the grill and fantastic — the first taco I've ever gotten that was too hot to pick up when I unwrapped it.

     Speaking of hot. We were there about 7 p.m., and people were sitting outside, enjoying dinner on the patio. It was 106 degrees. But a dry heat. You get used to it.

Measuring a ruler

    

    Believe it or not, as much stuff as I write here, every ... goddamn ... day, not everything I write gets posted. Like this, a follow-up on last week's column on the Field Museum's show, "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery," that kept getting bumped by more pressing topics. Honestly, as the days piled on, given the third-rail aspect of the topic, I considered just adding it to the list of emergency, Fire Axe Behind the Glass columns to run should I get hit by a bus. Which is kinda what happened, given, that I find myself in Phoenix, where it hit 111 degrees Wednesday and is supposed to do the same today. But it's a dry heat ... More on that tomorrow, I imagine.

     The word "oriental" was retired from polite society a number of years ago because it smacked of the Western eagerness to view unfamiliar Eastern cultures as exotic. Egyptian hieroglyphics conveying tax rolls and recipes for beer were mistaken for incantations and other mystic hooha.  Asian women were fetishized into geishas and courtesans, part of the general practice of presenting classes of Others, not as complicated, multi-dimensional human beings such as ourselves, but flat cut-outs, redolent of incense, eroticism and intrigue.

     Finally scholarship rid itself of that attitude. 

    I thought.

     Though that Ripley's Believe It or Not view of the world came to mind while reading the comments after my Friday column on the "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery" exhibit at the Field Museum. I had spoken the silent part, wondering where the whitebread American death rituals were. The Field, with  charming and unexpected candor, said, in essence, two things: 1) "This is the stuff we collected" and 2) The white social baggage is in the heads of the visitors.

       Of course. Anthropology is generally the study of tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and nomads in the Punjab. While there is a fine tradition of Western academics turning that microscope upon ourselves, whether examining the social structure of city blocks or suburban cheerleading squads, that seems more the recent exception than the longtime rule. Why study ourselves? We know ourselves. We're familiar. We're normal, and the standard by which others are judged. Exploring ourselves would be like measuring a ruler.

     While I admired the pith of the reader who observed, "We don’t usually see horses or squirrels in the zoo, either," I disagreed with the thinking behind the remark. First, it's simply wrong. The Lincoln Park Zoo has a Farm-in-the-Zoo, with cows and goats and, yes, horses, or ponies anyway. A zebra might be more exotic, to us, than a horse, but it would be hard to argue that it's somehow a more intrinsically interesting animal.
     But it's also an antique way of thinking. The flip side of viewing the world as exotic is viewing ourselves as ordinary, the scenery and curtains that are to be ignored while taking in the rich pageant of life is celebrated. It is an equally defective way of thinking. I have no sympathy for the strident self-victimization of the anti-woke segment of this country, and that is not why I pointed the lapse out What I was trying to say is, that when the world is being gathered and presented, supposedly in its totality, such as at the Field death show, I would like to be considered part of it. The multitudinous sins of my race — some of them perpetrated against my religion — do not exile their descendent from the realm of the living. Not yet anyway.

     Yes, the pendulum swings, and given the centuries of unashamed bigotry, it's a fine thing to see it going the other way. To a point. My central complaint about the "Death" show is that nobody considered the bulk of visitors might appreciate learning about a few of their own culture's many odd rituals and beliefs. It seems a failure to lay out Chinese hell but ignore Dante's hell.

     I hope this isn't all about ego, the boost of being showcased. I suppose there has to be some of that. But there are interesting aspects the Field left on the table. If we wanted to show the way Western society tries to thwart death, to negate it, those Victorian death photos, such as above, would be an apt vehicle, unfamiliar to most visitors. Or below, the circa World War I New York Police Department glass plate photographs Luc Sante unearthed and gathered in his chilling 1992 book, "Evidence." You can't say they aren't interesting. There's a danger when certain realms stop being considered worthy of contemplation. The NYPD tossed thousands of these glass plates into New York harbor — Sante, now Lucy Sante, was lucky to find a few boxes overlooked under a stairwell. When we don't consider the full range of history to be significant, losses are certain to follow.

from Luc Sante's "Evidence"

Straight from the Blagojevich playbook

     

Samuel Johnson

Like the mayor, I sometimes cite quotations.
     For instance, a reader will occasionally write in, just baffled by one of my columns. What do I mean by “religion should be voluntary”? That’s craaaaa-zeeee. Maybe I could explain it to him, take his hand and walk him through it?
     In such cases, I try to hurry silently on, but sometimes pause to share my favorite quote from the great dictionary writer and wit, Samuel Johnson: “Sir, I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
     I can’t tell if that does anything for the reader; but it makes me feel better. And, more to the point, it is relevant, a way of saying, “The column is clear enough, bub. Figure it out. Or don’t.”
     That cannot be said for Brandon Johnson’s reply when asked Monday about his firing of Chicago’s diligent health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, without the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting, or even of telling her himself on the phone. An underling did the deed, late Friday. A question was posed: What about that, Mr. Mayor?
     “You can’t always go by the things that you hear. Right? ‘Real eyes realize real lies,’” Johnson replied, quoting Tupac Shakur.
     So a follow-up question: What the heck does that mean? What are you saying? That the question is premised on a lie? Then Awardy still has her job? Was she not fired? Did the mayor indeed give her the sort of respectful termination that might, oh, I don’t know, encourage another highly skilled health professional to agree to replace her? Someone the city will desperately need as COVID rates rise and God-knows what new nightmare Hot Zone plague is at this very moment dripping out of a bat’s backside somewhere, heading to a rendezvous at O’Hare International Airport and then every block of the city of Chicago?

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Flashback 1998: 1890s newspaperman slashing prose stings today

Brann

     Baylor University is in the news, applying for — and receiving — a religious exemption to the Department of Education ban on sexual harassment, so that any young LGBTQ person who has the misfortune to find themselves on campus can feel the full lash of Southern Baptist hospitality. 

    This of course brought to mind my hero, William Cowper Brann. I plan to channel him in the newspaper, eventually. Until then, here's a column about him, published 25 years ago.

     He wielded a pen like a razor, and gleefully slashed at his many, many enemies, one of whom stepped out of a dusty street in Waco, Texas, and shot him in the back, "where the suspenders crossed," 100 years ago this past Wednesday.
     His name was William Cowper Brann. He is utterly forgotten today — his name appeared just once in this newspaper, 41 years ago — so I thought I would take advantage of the anniversary to introduce you to this son of Illinois, whose acidic personality got him tossed out of newspaper jobs from Matteson southward until he ended up in Waco, where he ran his paper, the Iconoclast, for three years before he was murdered.
    In that short span of time, the Iconoclast went from a tiny local monthly (he ran off 50 copies of the first edition, sold those, then rushed the money back to the printer to pay for more issues) to a famed journal of international reputation with 100,000 subscribers, a testament to the eternal public hunger for a mean guy with high standards who doesn't pull his punches.
     In the first issue, February, 1895, he went after a hugely popular columnist, T. DeWitt Talmadge, who had called Brann "the Apostle of the Devil" (a nickname that even Brann devotees came to use). Brann dismissed him as a "wide-lipped blatherskite" and "a religious faker."
     "The Iconoclast will pay any man $10 who will demonstrate that T. DeWitt Talmadge ever originated an idea, good, bad or indifferent," Brann wrote. "He is simply a monstrous bag of fetid wind."
     That was mild for Brann; he suggested another group of opponents "should have been hanged with their own umbilicular cords at birth."
     Brann unspooled James Whitcomb Riley's nauseating verse ("So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes.") until he couldn't take it anymore.
     "Ah, God! A little ice water and a fan, please," Brann wrote, conjuring up the image of the Hoosier poet swooning from his own muse. "He revives, he totters to his feet, he smites his breast, he gropes hither and yon in his delirious ecstasy. . . . Perhaps he can persuade his star-eyed charmer to wear green goggles or only squint at him through a piece of smoked glass."
     Is it fair that Riley's name endures, sort of, and Brann's is forgotten?
     On the celebrity wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough, Brann noted that "the fiance of Miss Vanderbilt is descended . . . through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty." And the bride? "A long, gaunt, skinny young female whose face would frighten any animal but a pauper duke out for the dough."
     One can only pine for what he would have done with the current Windsors.
     The man certainly had his faults — particularly a jarring, bottomless racism (though reading his views on the subject is a sobering reminder of what racism is, now that the term is tossed about as lightly as a beach ball in summer).
     Brann's subjects have a way of reverberating a century later. The "Slick Willie" in the White House now is only an encore of "Slippery Bill" McKinley, whose rise Brann mourned as if it were the coming of doom.
     "In 30 years we have passed, by regular gradation, from the wisdom of Lincoln to the stupidity of (President) Cleveland, and it may be the will of God that we should drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs . . . (and elect) a political nonentity astride a vacuum."
     Brann battled the rabid anti-Catholicism that was so popular in the 1890s, primarily by attacking Baylor University, the preeminent local Baptist establishment. After a Brazilian Catholic girl, brought to Baylor to be trained as a Baptist missionary, instead got pregnant, Brann used the incident to heap an endless river of abuse on the school. A high point was his starting a fund drive to raise a marble monument on campus to the infant, who had died.
"It seems to me that the great Baptist seminary has been strangely derelict in its duty — has failed to properly advertise itself as a place where souls are made as well as saved," he wrote. "Baylor is far too modest. It received an ignorant little Catholic as raw material, and sent forth two Baptists as the finished products."
     The college, needless to say, writhed under Brann's lash. A mob of Baylor students kidnapped Brann at gunpoint, beat him, and might have lynched him had professors not interceded.
     On April 1, 1898, the father of one Baylor girl stepped out of the twilight and shot Brann in the back. Never one to treat a foe lightly, Brann whirled around and emptied his gun into his attacker. Both men died, Brann lingering until the early morning of April 2 — a day he was to begin a speaking tour that would have led him northward, perhaps as far as Chicago.
     I think he'd be pleased by the idea that, a century after his cowardly murder, his words are finally echoing here:
     "People frequently say to me, 'Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen.' Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter. . . . Never attempt to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work."
      —originally published in the Sun-Times, April 5, 1998