Is it the shoes?

 

Those wouldn't be size 14s by any chance?

   Postage stamps. Crystal. Office chairs.
   To Chicagoans of a certain vintage, the above miscellany should conjure up Dan Rostenkowski as clearly as if I had posted his photograph. The minor grafts that ruined him, the pebbles upon which the great chairman of the Ways and Mean Committee scuttled his career and sent himself to prison.
    Not to single Rosty out. Corruption is always over petty shit, compared to the damage done. Ed Burke, off to jail for ... anybody? ... corruptly holding back a driveway cut-out exemption for a Burger King until his law firm got some business thrown its way.  Mike Madigan mumbling the wrong phrase into a federal wiretap. George Ryan crumpling an envelope holding a thousand dollars in cash and jamming it in his pocket. Rod Blagojevich tossed to the wolves by his father-in-law, Dick Mell, over the governor shutting down a landfill owned by Patti's cousin. It would look ludicrous in fiction.
    Okay, not always petty shit. Ed Vrdolyak went away for a significant chunk of cash — a $1.5 million kickback scheme. Although, compared  to the billions the Vrdolyak Law Group rakes in on personal injury lawsuits, still chump change. As always, the crime is what's legal.
     Into this pantheon leaps Mayor Unforced Error, Brandon Johnson, according to the Sun-Times, with his pathetic take of luxury goods — Hugo Boss cufflinks, a Montblanc Pen, handbags by Kate Spade and Givenchy. The usual baubles.
    Not to suggest anything untoward. Perhaps everything is on the up-and-up, as the mayor insists with his trademark huff. Maybe his wife isn't carrying that Kate Spade purse. Maybe his failure to account for the gifts is just him being too busy doing important work, driving the city deeper into ruin. His blocking the inspector general from looking into the matter is due entirely to distraction. No time to follow standard ethical policy. Yeah, that's the ticket. Though the guilty flee where none pursueth, and were the mayor handling gifts properly, why did he do everything he could to keep prying eyes off the supposed trove? Why wax so indignant? (The answer to that could be, "Because he always does." Truly, the man bristles at a touch).

     At this moment, what journalists are no doubt pawing over photos of the mayor, looking for him wearing a pair of Carucci shoes, whatever those may be. Careers have foundered over less.

Ronald Reagan's dream come true

Vent Haven Museum, Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky

     The Reagan epiphany was a simple one. With overt racism fallen from favor, in some quarters, you could no longer directly afflict the people you are keen to scorn— the minorities, the immigrants, the poor, gays, not to forget women, who are actually the majority but historically vulnerable because of their sex. 

      But you could assail the government that helps them. Starve it by slashing taxes, for the rich. Smother programs. Jettison goals. Scrap supportive laws and pass restrictive ones.
    Public education, once the bedrock of American society, could be abandoned once Black people found their way into white classrooms. School choice could be boosted, and here "choice" means "using tax money to pay for private schools for parents who couldn't bear to let their kids rub elbows with their lessers." 

     People bought it.

    That many of your own kind are hurt — most people in poverty are white — didn't matter. Bigotry is both a kind of ignorance and a form of self-immolation. Southern towns would fill in their swimming pools in the 1960s after the courts ordered them integrated. If your own children sweltered, well, there are always private clubs, and another reason to hate the people you hate already. 

    And there's always someone to hate, to fear, if that is what you are looking for. 
    The task never ends, and when would-be demagogue Donald Trump took office, he arrived with a flurry of spite and vindictiveness, sprayed in all directions, against groups and individuals who dared stand up to him in the past, a practice, already rare, sure to become rarer. 

      Trans soldiers were ejected from the army, based on nothing more than malice and general distaste. The same calumnies directed at Black military personnel until Truman integrated the Army in 1948 could be retrofitted. Any port in a storm. The first thing the new secretary of defense did was strip former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of his security detail and security clearance, and take steps to bust him in rank in retirement. The first thing.

     Whatever pressing matters the country faces are pushed aside. The need for a functioning military is overlooked. 
     So, open season on vulnerable Americans and the government that serves them. The whole system torn down, as if by a child. That the government does so much, from building roads to testing the purity of food and drugs, that it helps so many, is simply ignored. Racism is both a form of ignorance and a powerful addiction that must be fed .... with somebody. Anyone will do. Democrats, liberals, will serve too, eventually. Does it seem the bond that should hold Americans together in unified purpose is easily dismissed? Apparently so. 

    Today's post is late — my apologies — and I know feels ... what? ... muted, wooden, subdued. That's an accurate rendition of my mood. There must be a lot of that going around.

Lady Liberty gets a makeover — the statue remains, the concept behind her is sold for scrap

     Look on the bright side. The Statue of Liberty is still there, at the mouth of New York Harbor. Facing southeast, to welcome immigrants arriving aboard ships. Lifting her lamp to light the golden door.
     "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ..." is still emblazoned on a plaque at the feet of the Mother of Exiles. "Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me."
     There is no plan — no public plan anyway — to take her down and sell the copper for scrap. Or jackhammer away Emma Lazarus' famous poem praising "a mighty woman." Or remove the torch and refashion her uplifted right hand to display an extended middle finger.
     Not to give anyone ideas. Defacing national monuments is already in the air — talk has resumed of adding Donald Trump's face to Mount Rushmore.
     The statue remains, for now. Only the concept behind her is being scuttled, the American welcome mat yanked away, again. The golden door slammed shut.
     U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — was busy in Chicago and across the country Monday. Hundreds of immigrants were arrested here, thousands nationwide, and while those arrested were portrayed as murderers and rapists, facts were scarce.
     I have a feeling that when the facts are known — and we can't assume the truth will ever be known, this being 2025 America — the bulk of deportees will end up having committed parking offenses, and of course, the unforgivable crime of being here in the first place. Which is what this is all about, and why Donald Trump is president — so we can throw out the foreigners along with their crime and disease and strange languages and get back to this country as we imagined it to be in the 1950s.
     A certain brand of foreigners, of course. From Mexico and South America, primarily. They haven't rounded up the Norwegians, yet. I contacted the French consulate in Chicago to see if their people here are on edge. Let's just say, they're not. The elimination of diversity efforts in government and anti-discrimination laws give further proof, as if more were needed, of what this is really about.
     The effort focused on Chicago. Here is where border czar Tom Homan was striding around, joined by — in that note of surreal horror that all true nightmares require — TV's Dr. Phil,  offering the ripping apart of families as entertainment, edging toward the strafed lifeboat full of refugees in George Orwell's "1984." Red meat for red state audiences.
     Remember why Chicago is being singled out. What is our crime again? Oh yes, we are a "sanctuary city," welcoming immigrants, who have so overrun the place that Chicago's population has been flat for 30 years. Chicago had more people in 1925 than it has today. We're being punished for seeing a situation clearly — we need residents — and acting upon it. Expect more of that.

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A visit from Lee Goodman

 

     "Aren't you jumping the gun?" I asked Sunday, as neighbor Lee Goodman took off his raincoat to reveal a striped concentration camp uniform, with the inverted blue triangle, representing immigrants. I invited him to have a seat in the living room.
      He said he was going downtown Monday to protest the ICE arrests in Chicago, and wanted me to know, I suppose, in case he disappeared into Donald Trump's growing security apparatus. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him. I considered going along, to observe, but had other work to do Monday and, besides, dramatic symbolic acts are not my strong suit. I prefer spinning reasoned argument to dash uselessly against the reinforced armor of unreason. I don't know which is more futile; I suppose it boils down to personal preference.
     I asked where he had gotten the uniform — what with Party City out of business and all. That's me, always curious about practical matters.  Those new red MAGA hats with the Death's Head insignia, who thought of that?

     Lee said he had made it himself, using a painter's outfit dyed grey, then masked out with tape and painted with black fabric paint. That's Lee, the guy who put up a sign tallying the COVID dead in 2020 at the corner of Shermer and Walters, prompting that to become a focal point for several pro-Trump rallies. He's the spoon that stirs the pot. I've admired his commitment to social action, even as I question its efficacy. As I question my own. 

     We talked about whether the Holocaust had so faded from public memory that younger people might not even know what it represented. 

    "They might see it and think, 'Beetlejuice,'" I suggested.

    Bingo. 

     "I was surprised by how little reaction my uniform got throughout the day," Lee later wrote, on his Facebook page report about how his trip downtown played out. "I was even more surprised that among the several people who did react, only one recognized the uniform. Everyone else thought I was dressed up as the movie character Beetlejuice. Only after I corrected them did their expressions change from amused to somber."

    Lee went to the Daley Center, City Hall, the County Building. He didn't get far trying to visit ICE headquarters and his senator's office.

   "Things didn't go as I expected," he wrote.

    They seldom do. 

    I'm torn. Part of me resented Lee for going straight to the Holocaust. Shouldn't we save that for when thousands of arrested immigrants are languishing in camps on the outskirts of town? Isn't the present moment alarming enough without exaggeration? I both admire Lee for doing something and look askance at what he's actually doing and a little at why he's doing it. Who does this help?

    "If I didn't do anything, it would eat me up," he said, and I nodded. I sometimes view protest as an elaborate washing of the hands — an orchestrated cry onto deaf ears done more for the benefit of the criers who can now tell themselves they've done something.

     The concentration camp imagery is powerful. The paper won't even let me call whatever facilities they're building to corral immigrants — and no doubt, eventually, citizens —  "concentration camps." Too judgy. I think we settled on "detainment camps." As if that mattered.

      Maybe that's the danger — thinking none of this matters, that resistance is futile. Resistance didn't topple the Nazis — America did. We saved Europe. But now, who will save us? Lee Goodman is on the case, and God bless him. But it's going to take more than that.

We need to support the people Trump is stepping on

     This fall will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of the "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." A comic romp sending up 1930s science fiction movies, it featured Tim Curry as Dr. Frank 'N' Furter, a cross-dressing mad scientist, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the naive young engaged couple who ... —  The movie was so popular, it feels almost strange to describe it, like explaining the plot of "Hamlet" — "See there's this guy, he's a prince, and his father is murdered ..." Everybody knew "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
     But times change.
     You did not attend the movie once but many times, bringing along props — squirt guns for the opening rainstorm, toast to throw. I was 15 when I first went with a group of friends.
     My parents neither noticed nor cared about me viewing this randy cross-dressing romp. We did not live in constant dread of trans people, nor worry about encountering them in bathrooms, nor fret about their influence on high school sports. There was no moral panic.
     Yes, trans people were played for humor. But then groups scorned by mainstream society traditionally tiptoe toward acceptability through comedy. It is a foot in the door, just as white households who'd never invited a Black guest to their table howled at "Amos and Andy" in the 1930s, and Jews who couldn't stay at a restricted resort in the 1950s could still tell jokes in its ballroom.
     There's nothing I can do here to stem the current fear-mongering, except point out where attention is being misdirected, like a magic trick. Card-carrying liberals darken at the topic, suddenly concerned about bathroom assaults and unfair swim meets.
     Democrats took to reflexively blaming the outcome of the last election on their previous — the "wreckless" is unspoken — acceptance of trans folk, as if addressing toilet etiquette by undoing democracy makes even momentary sense. "Look at those drapes! We must burn the house down."
     I try to make my friends step back and see how the issue is being framed for them and usually fail. They aren't considering the vast number of Americans who have this orientation and struggle to live but the margins, the nagging issues — do not male bodies pose unfair advantage in the 100-meter dash?
     It's like any other prejudice, only not as noticeable. If every time someone mentioned the word "Muslim" I began ranting about terrorists, or every time the word "immigrant" came up I cited some ghastly crime against a 12-year-old girl, you'd peg me as a hater. Terror and crime are real problems; the hate is in pretending these problems represent the entirety.
 

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Flashback 1995: Bob Watch debuts

Illustration by Jeff Heller

     Journalism is disposable. Reporters who don't get that are fooling themselves. A fraction of the population ever sees our work, fewer still read it, and that handful forgets what they read the next day, if not the next minute.
     That said, scraps of my oeuvre linger. Every few years someone will dredge up my 2004 book "Hatless Jack" and, oblivious of what it's about, seek out my opinion on how Kennedy killed hats. 
     And Bob Watch, the monthly ad hominem vivisection of Tribune columnist Bob Greene that debuted in the Chicago Reader 30 years ago Monday, Jan. 27, 1995, under the slogan, "We read him so you don't have to."
     I'm not sure why, of all my stuff, Bob Watch should persist. Perhaps it has a sharp-edge that people like. A crystalline meanness. The great Gene Weingarten recently cited Bob Watch after dredging up a Bob Greene column on Bob Evans, which he identifies as the worst column ever written, a prize that Greene seemed to vigorously vie for. I felt honored that the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner remembered me.
     I should tell the story. Spy magazine had come out and I decided: "These are my people." I flew to New York and spent some time with founding editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson. While I was there, I pitched stories, including Bob Greene — but he was already in works, and I ended up writing the sidebars to Magda Krance's gleeful keelhauling of Bob. (My favorite was "How a Press Release Becomes a Bob Greene Column," where I selected columns of his that obviously had come from corporate ballyhoo, then contacting the companies to get ahold of the relevant releases that sparked Bob's muse. I'll have to dredge that up and share it someday. The similarities alone should have cost Greene his job, had anyone in authority at the Tribune been paying attention. Spoiler alert: they weren't).
     The Spy pieces caught the fancy my friend of Cate Plys, then an editor at the Reader, who suggested I take a whack at Bob every month. This was my first entry. I'm surprised at how brief it is: a mere 428 words But I manage to pack a lot of scorn in a small space. It's poignant to be sharing it now, as the Reader is laying off its staff and seems destined to crumble and be swept into the dustbin that awaits us all. I hope they can survive — the Reader has always provided an important outlet for perspectives that would never otherwise be shared in the mainstream media. Like Bob Watch, which ran for two years, and began this way:

     Those who sincerely admire and respect Bob Greene – who read his columns aloud to entertain their dozens of cats, perhaps – should leave the room now. We don’t want to upset them.
     That leaves those of us who can rationalize his existence only by inverting the normal expectations of readership – instead of excoriating his faults, savoring them. We pick up his column with a tingle of anticipation – how awful will it be? Will he content himself with another effortless sputtering of baby talk, lavished over one of his pitiful handful of themes and interests? Or will he reach some new benchmark of idiocy?
     Bob loves imperiled kids, and himself holds a key role in the chain of abuse. Parents torture their kids, DCFS ignores them, the schools and the courts bungle the situation, and, finally, the tiny emaciated survivors are led into a room where Uncle Bob awaits, cooing sympathetically while he boosts them onto his knee for the Final Abuse, the flopping out of his revolting pity.           This week he sallied day after day, again and again, to the defense of “a little boy in deep, terrible trouble,” an unfortunate he called, “with typical folksiness, “Joe.” Last week it was a class of handicapped students who had lost the services of a speech therapist. The last sentence of this column, where Bob appeals to Mayor Daley to personally intercede, is a joy. You can see the mayor of Bob’s fantasy world – porkpie hat, big cigar, sitting in the bathtub – crushing the paper in his little fists and squeaking “Why, why, this is an outrage!”

     The next day, Bob rewrote the New York Times obit of Victor Riesel, the columnist blinded in 1957 when acid was thrown in his face by union thugs. Bob begins the tale by conjuring up his beloved idyll of 1950s Columbus, Ohio, where little Bobby Greene learned about the courageous newspaperman who wouldn’t back down. Though Bob gets almost halfway through the column before he remembers to mention Riesel’s name, he implies that the “kid reading the paper [who] wondered about the man behind the glasses” was inspired by Riesel’s example. We are left marveling how a blind man’s bravery helped embolden one special little boy to someday become Bob Greene, nostalgist of courage, boldly speaking his truths and letting the chips fall where they may, whether he is daring to openly worship Michael Jordan or mourning the passing of toaster covers.
     Bob doesn’t quite come out and say it but, from his vantage point, Riesel’s sight must seem a small price to pay.

Flashback 2008: "Sympathy for the Daley"

Managing all that stuff isn't easy. A room at the Northwestern University Archives in 2023.

     January is a cold month, and it should come as no surprise that death has been busy. Wednesday, the day the obituary for my esteemed colleague Rich Hein ran in the paper, a classmate asked me if I had heard that Pat Quinn died. I had not.
     Quinn was the archivist at Northwestern University, and given my affection for research, of course I knew him, and benefited over the decades from his enthusiasm and expertise. He was especially helpful when I was writing my pranks book, though whenever I visited Deering Library — a vast improvement over the tri-towered mess of poured concrete that is the university's main library — I would pop in and visit.
     When Pat retired in 2008, I noted it in the column, which I reprint here in full since it is — he said modestly — a hoot. Plus its general tone explains why my invitation to speak at Northwestern's commencement has been slow in coming. The original online headline was, "Sympathy for Daley — So he's not George Clooney — Chicago's scrappy mayor can teach Northwestern's pampered graduating class a thing or two."
     This was from when the column ran a thousand words and filed the page, and I've kept in the original headings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     What a bunch of babies.
     Even considering the constant embarrassment that Northwestern University has been inflicting upon its shuddering alumni lately, this is a new low, as NU's pampered undergraduates send up a chorus of complaint because their commencement speaker is Mayor Richard M. Daley.
     A "slap in the face to graduating seniors" one whined.
     Well . . .
     I've been writing about Daley since he took office, and I can't remember ever feeling as much sympathy for him as I do now. It's hard to write a commencement address and a pain in the ass to deliver one, never mind to a gang of 21-year-olds from Scottsdale and Connecticut who have their dander up because you aren't the Dalai Lama or George Clooney or somebody they can brag about to their chums at Stanford (Oprah Winfrey!) or Harvard (J.K. Rowling!).
     Say what you will about Daley, but being the son of the former mayor didn't guarantee him his job — not the way many spurning him will have their careers handed to them on a platter by Dad. Daley had his perks, but the long knives were also out for him after the old man died. Daley's path was uncertain, and he learned a thing or two that might help an ambitious graduate.
     Last year, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the commencement speaker. Nobody howled about the TV star, but the embattled city mayor gets catcalls.
     This is what they call "a teaching moment." For years, Northwestern liked to festoon its official materials with the best advice a graduate can get, spoken by Adlai E. Stevenson:

     "Your days are short here," he said. "This is the last of your springs. . . . And don't forget, when you leave, why you came."
     Is that really why the Northwestern Class of '08 went to college? To bask in the reflected status of some rock-star commencement speaker?

SPRING 2008

     "Free Sun-Times!?" a bright young man in mod eyeglasses half exclaimed, half asked, poking a folded paper in my direction as I cleared the steps at Union Station and broke into the fresh air and sunlight of Madison Street.
     I subscribe, of course. But that copy stays at home with my wife, so I buy the paper at the Northbrook station. There's another copy waiting on my desk. So I'm covered, Sun-Times-wise. But I was so glad to see somebody waving the flag, that after weighing the merits of wasting a promotional paper vs. supporting the boys in the trenches, I smiled, thanked him and took it.
     The exchange slowed me down a couple of seconds, enough that, a few steps later, when I glanced down at the green water of the Chicago River as I passed the center of the Madison Street Bridge, I saw the front edge of something massive moving out from underneath.
     It was the Robert F. Deegan, out of Thorofare, N.J., a huge barge, its width spanning a third of the river.
     I settled against the rail to watch the enormous vessel pass under my feet, all gray metal walkways and red rust stains. Pushing it was a tugboat, the Donald C. Hannah — nearly 90 feet long, with a 2400 horsepower engine — out of Lemont.
     It took a minute for them to move a block south toward St. Louis. I watched the boats recede, joined by a solitary gull circling around. The barge and the tug cleared the Monroe Street bridge, and the gull peeled off.
     Taking its cue, I headed toward work, stepping into Harry's Hot Dogs at Randolph and Franklin to quietly set the folded newspaper on the orange linoleum counter, where somebody could find it.

MY WAR AGAINST BUCKTHORN

     Call it "buckthorn suppression," the stroll around my property, with its narrow stretch of woods on the east side, eyes on the ground, pausing to bend over and pull up the small buckthorn sprouts that grow everywhere no matter what I do. You need to catch them early, when they are 2 or 3 inches long, because very quickly they're 6 inches tall with roots so deep you have to dig them out.
     Having had to saw down several 15-foot tall versions of the gnarly, bethorned tree, I know the danger of neglect, but still am surprised by my zeal. It is against the law — the Illinois Exotic Weed Act, to be specific, as amended in 2004 — to "buy, sell, offer for sale, distribute or plant" buckthorns without a permit, and they will only be issued to those experimenting with new ways to kill it.
     As is common with zealotry, my animosity against this plant, with its deeply veined, oval leaves, is catching. When we went to the Brookfield Zoo last Sunday, it was my wife who kept pointing out that much of its 216 acres are choked with buckthorn.
     Deeply ironic that a facility dedicated to preserving creatures from natural habitats around the world would play host to this destroyer of Illinois vegetation — invasive plants crowd out and kill native species. In its defense, Brookfield Zoo is aware of the problem.
     "We don't have enough staff to keep up with it," said Nicole DiVito, a spokeswoman. "We're doing as much as we can. Occasionally, we're getting volunteers, and slowly getting rid of it."
     I asked her to let me know next time Brookfield has its Let's Kill the Buckthorn Day. I'll help. Because, really, what's the point of highlighting the biological diversity of the earth, if every plant is going to be the vegetable cousin of the cockroach?

PERSONAL NOTE

     Patrick M. Quinn, the archivist at NU for 34 years, is retiring today. As luck would have it, I called him to check the Stevenson quote, and he pointed out — in characteristic fashion — that Stevenson did not say it at NU, but at a senior dinner at Princeton in 1954, and that Northwestern, also in characteristic fashion, alas, seized it as its own, for years, until he stopped them. Thanks for all the help, Pat. Good luck and God bless.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 2008