Eventually the truth sinks in. Doesn't it?

     What I remember most about the days after 9/11 was that nothing was funny. There was no joke to be made, no mitigating light remark to soothe the terror of such a sudden attack on such prominent landmarks—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—resulting in 3,000 deaths of ordinary Americans going about their regular lives.
     And then the Onion came out, and offered the perfect story, under the delightfully deadpan headline, "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell."
     With the dateline, "JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS," it contained paragraphs like:

     "I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

     I did not — and God, it hurts me to have to say this directly, but we seem to have come to that place — believe I was reading an actual news report about the eschatological fate of the 9/11 hijackers. The Onion is humor, parody. Yes, occasionally certain tone-deaf dolts would wave an Onion story over their heads in sincere alarm—Chinese government agencies seemed to be particularly prone to this—but that was part of the fun. People fell for this. 
     It was only after the recent presidential election,  when the role of "fake news" in luring Americans to vote for the fraud and Russian puppet Donald Trump was being debated, did I pause to consider where The Onion and its ilk would fit in to this new landscape, with the deep credulity of our fellow citizens suddenly in all-too-clear relief. 
    Will The Onion be vetted as "fake news" and appropriately flagged so that readers who might think that Bill Clinton was actually dispatching vowels to the Bosnian cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny, as the Onion reported in December, 1995, would not be led astray? 
    What a sad world that would be. How easily the perpetrators of fake news will either strip off the fake news designations or wrongly apply whatever little "IT'S REAL!!!" smily face that Facebook creates to reassure readers that what their reading has a relationship with reality. And what about the stretched, spurious, one-sided arguments that pundits — myself included, I am told — weave? Who decides?
    Here's a thought. Instead of vetting the facts, why not teach people to be more skeptical? To have a baseline knowledge of history, science and current events. To be particularly dubious about reports that tickle their own biases. So you don't show up at a suburban pizza parlor with a gun looking for the child sex ring you've been told that Hillary Clinton, whom you hate with the burning white hot passion of a thousand suns, runs there.  
   Journalists have been trained to do this. "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out" to quote the famous City News Bureau edict. We can train the public too. 
    Yes, incredible stuff does happen, and there's little harm in saying, "Really? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Says who?" I remember when I was told that a suburban bank president had put a note praising Hitler into his bank's newsletter. "Suburban bank presidents don't praise Hitler in their bank newsletters," I said, drily, at first. But I checked it out anyway. Turns out, this one did.
     Consider the source. One reason fake news is thriving is that the Republicans, uncomfortable with the truth of their existence, have done such a good job of discrediting what is called with a sneer "the mainstream media." Even though that is the place most likely to reflect the living world. Which is why they hate it so. If there were a stranger sitting in your living room, and every day, as you came down the stairs to breakfast, he loudly announced, "You're ugly and on your way to do stupid things that will hurt your country," you'd hate him too, even if it were true. Especially if it were true. 
     That said, upon reflection, the idea of making people more skeptical is naive, because it is predicated on the notion—the flimsy notion—that people want to perceive the world as it actually is. When all evidence indicates the contrary: what they want is to dwell in whatever phantasm they find comfortable, and will not only decorate the walls with the baldest lies, but passionately defend their right to do so. 
     Where does that leave us? Carrying on as before, perhaps. Fake news has a value, as a parodic reflection of the world. It's fun. Last April 1, despairing of topping the previous year's announcement that "April is Puppetry Month," I considered not doing an April 1 post—besides, I was too tired of the blog. 
     Then I went with that thought, with a post headlined, "The End," announcing I was quitting. Every single since fact in the post was an outsized lie, from my claim to have 5,000 readers a day, to saying my column was praised by Carol Moseley-Braun, who despises me, to mentioning my column runs five days a week in the Sun-Times. 
     After it was posted, I heard from a number of colleagues I respect, giving their serious condolences, which surprised and horrified me. Including, the author of an important Illinois political blog, sniffing around in that I-smell-a-lie fashion we reporters have. Did I, he wondered, insinuatingly, really earn $10,000 a month from blog advertisements? I let him go on a bit.
     "So let me get this straight,"I finally said. "You're asking me about something in my April 1 blog post? You read something I posted on the First of April, and you want to know if that April 1 post is factually correct? Is that right?" I kept saying versions of this, and eventually the truth sank in.
     That's a beautiful phrase, isn't it? Eventually the truth sank in. If only we could hope that would happen with the American public. But it won't. Or at least it will take a long, long time. That is the truth here. A scary truth. Small wonder we're having such a hard time letting it sink in.

Bicyclists! If you want to live, blow that red light!

     For Mad Max messengers, tattooed, wrapped in chains and merino wool, riding their $2,000 titanium alloy bicycles painted matte black to deter thieves, a red light is not a command to stop so much as a gentle hint there might be traffic whizzing ahead, so they should put on a burst of speed when threading between the cars and trucks.
     I knew bike messengers did that. Turns out, most everybody else does too.
     At least according to "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," a new study by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.
     Turns out only 1 in 50 cyclists stop at stop signs if there's no traffic coming. A quarter don't stop when there is traffic. Red lights fare a bit better.
     Not only that, but the study gives the practice a big thumbs up.
     Which is a relief because, to be honest, even I roll through the stop signs and sometimes the lights.
     On my sky blue Divvy, huffing from Point A to Point B, I come to a red light, slow, and yes, I will jut a foot out and actually stop if there's cross traffic coming. If not, a quick glance left and right, a mental "So long, suckers!" tossed at the cars dutifully waiting, and onward across the street.
     Not only a way to conserve forward momentum — so important to tired 56-year-old legs pushing a 45-pound Divvy — but also as a safer way to ride.
     What might be dangerous, counterintuitively, is NOT blowing the red light.
     The DePaul paper cites a 2007 London study shows women are killed by large trucks at three times the rate of men, and they offer one of those Malcolm Gladwell-type explanations:
     “The Transport for London report posits that women are more vulnerable to truck collisions due to their tendency to be less likely to disobey red traffic signals than men. By going through a red traffic signal before it turns green, men are less likely to be caught in a truck driver’s blind spot. Instead, they get in front of the truck before it starts to enter the intersection.”
     I knew it felt right to blast out ahead of traffic before those trucks. The study also encourages the city to make such “Idaho Stops’ legal (so called because Idaho did just that in 1982 and bike accidents went down). Though I don’t imagine Chicago police are writing many tickets on rolling through red lights — about 1,300 tickets a year are written to Chicago bicyclists, the “vast majority” for riding on the sidewalk, illegal for those older than 12.
     The study also found what I already know — I love studies that do that: bikes are a better way around town. In 33 out of 45 matched trips between randomly chosen points in the city, biking is faster. And these were long trips — average seven miles. For trips of a mile or so, the bike wins hands down. Faster than a car or cab, which have to sit at lights remember.
     And cheaper. A yearly Divvy membership costs 30 cents a day. It costs $3.25 just to get in a cab, which I hardly ever do. I broke down and got in a cab last week, because it was 5 p.m. and I was at the Hilton on South Michigan and figured I’d race to Union Station and catch an earlier train. Big mistake. The ride cost $10 — well, that’s what I spent when I realized I could walk faster and get out. The only reason I took the cab, I realized grimly, was it had been so long I forgot what they are like.
     There is one hazard the study doesn’t mention. We are a country that, it is increasingly clear, is built on disregard for social order and on generalized envy. If bicycles are officially allowed to blow through red lights, will it be long before cars start doing the same? Leading to the kind of chaotic free-for-all that makes traffic such an ordeal in Third World countries. We do seem to be drifting in that direction, if not pedaling hard in that direction.

The Typo Department

 

     You know what I hate? I hate when somebody finds an error, a typo, a factual slip, in my copy, and then waves it over their head as a general indictment of myself and my writing.
     I hate that.
     As a writer.
    However, as a reader, it is a different story.
     Sometimes I'm reading along, reading, happy as a clam, and I stub my toe on somebody else's mistake. It stops me dead. Such as what happened Wednesday, reading "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," the new report by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University. Friday's column is going to revolve around it.

     I appreciate the well-designed cover. Admire the lay-out of the "Study Team" page with its four authors and three designers. I enjoy the concision of its executive summary. 

    Then on page two, the first section, "I. POLICIES AND REGULATIONS GOVERNING BIKING IN CHICAGO."This paragraph:

     Although Chicago has received national attention recently for its bike-friendliness, it is often overlooked that the city has embraced and encouraged this mode for many decades. The city has a long tradition of investing in biking infrastructure, starting in earnest with Mayor Calvin Harrison, who created a bike path from the Edgewater neighborhood to Evanston and made bicycling a prominent part of the 1897 mayoral campaign. Between the 1960s and early 2000s, both Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley also demonstrated a commitment to cycling improvements, including off-street trails and protected bike lanes.

    Did anything leap out at you in that paragraph?
    Maybe "Mayor Calvin Harrison." No? Because it sure popped me in the nose. Based on the year, they mean Mayor Carter Harrison. One of the most famous mayors in Chicago history not named Daley.
    Yes, I know, to write is to err. Yes, I know I am capable of making the same kind of mistake and worse.
    But still....
    Calvin Harrison. Perhaps because it's in the very beginning of an academic report with four authors. Perhaps because it's such a famous mayor — really, it's like citing Mayor Harvey Washington.
    I sympathize with those behind the study — which I found useful and interesting and write about on Friday. But c'mon guys. A thing like that calls the rest into question. And at the very beginning. If you're going to drop hair in your food, at least have it in the dessert and not the appetizer.
    Writing is a learning experience, and I've learned, from this, just how vexing those mistakes are, to a reader. Next time someone plucks a Calvin Harrison out of my copy, I plan to be less testy, less defensive, and more sincerely aghast. It really undercuts all your hard work. 

The Russians taking us over was once a college joke

     Growing up in the 1970s, I often heard Ohioans mutter darkly about the Russians "taking us over." Which, even as a green Buckeye bean, struck me as insane. The United States was so big and powerful. What were the Russians going to do, occupy us?
     A reminder that Donald Trump didn't invent projecting your own flaws onto others. We feared and hated the Soviets as aggressors, even though we were the ones who tried to strangle them in the cradle. How many Americans know that, in late 1918, U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing invaded Siberia with 5,000 American soldiers? A daft attempt to overthrow the Russian Revolution. Of course they'd be suspicious of us after that. We were indeed out to get them, and had already tried once.
     How our country, so fearful of Russia, could turn around in 2016 and unilaterally surrender to Moscow, is a mystery. How could it elect this panting fanboy of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin? Then nod grinning as people do in nightmares, as he staffs his Cabinet with Russian flunkies like Putin pal, wearer of the Russian "Order of Friendship" and our next secretary of state, apparently, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.      

     This is the stuff of jokes, of bad undergraduate humor. Junior year of college I wrote a brief graphic novel for the school humor magazine called "Let's Capitulate to the Russians," illustrated by future New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton.
     In it, the United States preemptively surrenders to the Reds. Suddenly the culture that can't produce a toaster that anyone would buy except at the point of a bayonet finds itself masters of what was once America. 

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Rob Sherman: Atheist. Activist. Asshole.

      It was easier to sympathize with Rob Sherman's cause than to sympathize with Rob Sherman. On one hand, he fought the good fight that others shirked or shrugged off—to resist the easy infiltration of religion into government, to hold America accountable to its secular ideals, and to frustrate those all-too-eager to put the weight of the law behind the symbols of their own particular faith. 
    On the other, he could be so grating about it, filing his lawsuits, haranguing officials, showing up at the newspaper on Sept. 11, 2001, practically unhinged, insisting that this, THIS is what religion leads to. I was glad he was doing what he was doing, I suppose. I just wished he would do it far away from me.
    The long-time Buffalo Grove resident seemed to be mellowing lately, branching out—he ran for Congress in the 5th District on the Green Party ticket last fall, promising to preserve jobs for coal miners and get "In God We Trust" off our money. He did not win.     
    During the campaign, I ran into him at the Sun-Times, having his portrait taken. He seemed in good spirits, and I was cordial, and wished him well. He had recently moved to a home with an airplane hangar in Poplar Grove. It was unwelcome news Sunday to read in the Daily Herald that a plane belonging to Sherman, 63, had crashed, killing its pilot. The coroner was slow to officially identify the victim as Sherman, but eventually it was announced that Sherman had died in the crash. Condolences to his friends and loved ones for their loss.
      For the rest of us, well, Rob Sherman was sui generis. There was no one like him, and in the years to come we might find ourselves wishing there were. It took courage to do what he did, and while he had flaws, he without question had fortitude. Even though his vexing qualities might be what first spring to mind. When I wrote "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances" in 1996, it seemed natural to begin the book with Sherman, and I'll reprint it here, as my tribute to this unique figure on the Chicago area landscape. I know the headline might strike some as a little harsh, and I went back and forth on using that last word. But then Sherman was a lot harsh, for decades, and it only seems fair. 

     Rob Sherman is a pest. he'd be the first to admit it. A professional atheist, Sherman has spent years pressuring suburbs around Chicago to purge their town hall lawns of nativity scenes and their crests of crosses and other religious trappings. He is as common a sight at city council meetings as folding chairs.
     Needless to say, people hate him. Sherman is pushy and aggressive and gets communities worked up over issues they'd rather not think about. And he never goes away.
     Even those who sympathize with Sherman sometimes find themselves blanching at his tactics. He is locally famous for having dragooned his young son, Ricky, into being a reluctant poster child for the atheist cause. The most notorious incident took places eight years go, when a columnist* visited Sherman's home and Ricky, then six, was trotted out for display.
    "Do we celebrate Christmas?" asked Sherman
     "No," Ricky answered.
     "Why not?" Sherman quizzed.
     "I don't know," Ricky said.
    "Because we're what?" Sherman persisted.
    The son was puzzled. "Smart," he ventured.
    "Because we're what?" Sherman prodded. "It starts with an A."
    The child thought a moment. Then it came to him.
     "Assholes?" he said eagerly. 

*Not me, incidentally, but Eric Zorn, and I half admired, half winced at how I seized his vignette for my own purposes. 

"Pipelines are everywhere"

Worker from Foltz Welding preparing an oil pipeline for installation. 

     PATOKA, Ill. — Crude oil comes out of the ground hot, then stays warm for weeks as it travels at a casual walking pace — about 3 miles an hour — through the nation's 2.5 million miles of oil pipeline, moving from well to refinery.
     The drama over one stretch of one pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota caught the nation's attention for months, until it ended in victory — for the protesters, for now — last week when the Army Corps of Engineers said it would not grant a right of way for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River near the Sioux land.
 

Oil tank

   But focus on the episode ignores a greater truth — that our nation, which consumes more oil than any other, depends on these pipelines to slake its bottomless thirst. The Dakota Access Pipeline cost $3 billion and will be finished sometime next year, if not passing near the Sioux land, then passing by somewhere. It's nearly 90 percent complete now.  
     Trace its route. The Dakota Access Pipeline, a 30-inch carbon-steel tube, begins in the oil fields of North Dakota, heads southeast for 1,172 miles, and ends here, in downstate Illinois, where its final stretch was laid last summer. It's a muddy field, awaiting re-planting, next to land owned by Energy Transfer, the consortium building the disputed pipeline, piled with green pipe that will be used to construct the final 10 percent.
     It's not the only pipeline in the world. Here it is joined by pipelines arriving from New Orleans, from Pontiac, Michigan, from Owensboro, Kentucky, from Alberta, Canada via the Keystone Pipeline, also controversial. More than a dozen separate lines converge around Patoka, running underground, about 4 feet deep along U.S. 51 then turning down "pipeline alley" to feed what is known as the Patoka Oil Tank Farm. More than 50 enormous white oil tanks....

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Patoka Oil Tank Farm

In for the long haul

     Someone once asked Lord Byron what it was like to live his life in a poetic frenzy.
     No man, he replied, can live his life in a state of poetic frenzy. How would he shave?
     I've been thinking of that line as, day by day, President-Elect Donald Trump has been filling out his cabinet with a rogue's gallery of the corrupt, the deluded and the unfit—though not Rudy Giuliani, thank God for small favors. Trump's supporters insist that credit be given for his right decisions, and I will happily flutter my hands to heave and cry "Hallelujah" at Giuliani being denied the world stage. The thought of that man, either insane or doing a fine imitation of insanity, becoming Secretary of State. The mind reels.
     And you really don't want your mind reeling too much, not every day, all day. Very unsettling, a constant state of reeling. At least mine for me. I know I've written that Trump's continuous  stream of lies and insults have to be responded to, forcefully. But can decent people spend the next four years continually keening in grief and alarm?
     My wife walked into my office Saturday, sincerely aghast at Donald Trump's latest jaw-dropping statement: bitching about being Time magazine's "Person of the Year." 
    "They were very politically correct," Trump told a rally at Baton Rouge, before polling the audience, who were enthusiastically in favor of "Man of the Year."
     Time magazine, though it had previously named women "Man of the Year"—Wallis Simpson, Elizabeth II even, ironically "American women" in 1975—changed the slogan to "Person of the Year" in 1999. 
     Is there a difference? 
     Sure. Any change is a little jarring. I remember when Ace commercials went from "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man" to "Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks," or some such thing. The groove of habit is etched into your mind, and any deviation just feels wrong, even if it is an improvement. You'd have to be a boob to urge Ace to go back to "man"—many of its employees are women; why exclude them from the advertising? So customers don't notice a shift?
     The adult adjusts to change, but the child, or the child within, howls for the old to be returned, now. The entire basis of our current political moment is an infantile retreat into nostalgia; fleeing into the past, when white men were in charge and life was better, so we have to get back there right away. 
     "Political correctness" is now the all-purpose, one-size-fits-all label that the Trumpians use to dismiss the new standards of racial, ethnic or sexual sensitivity.  Upset that your local bus station has gone back to water fountains labeled "White only" and "Colored?" Don't like the yellow star sewn to your coat? Cope with it, you lost! Try not to be so politically correct!
     It wasn't that I didn't share my wife's outrage, I do. Rather, I have my outrage meter dialed down of late. You go to the forest, you wear yourself out if you start pointing out each tree. I used the Time magazine opportunity to talk about pacing. The world has officially gone crazy, as a wave of backward-looking nativism that the lumpen population has been gulled into believing will bring prosperity. Britain departed from the European Union like a passenger leaping from a plane because he doesn't like who's seated next to him.  The Philippines elected a murderous madman in the form of Rodrigo Duterte. Now we've got four years of Donald Trump. We'll be lucky if by May France hasn't elected Marine Le Pen. 
    This is a nightmare that is only beginning. Years will pass until it peaks, until the wave crashes and begins to roll back and we can see what our soggy world has become.
     I'm not saying we surrender, lay back and let the changes wash over us. They of course must be resisted. But fear and outrage are not in themselves productive.  
    "Dismiss your grief and fear," Virgil has Aeneas counsel his men in "The Aeneid." "Save your strength for better times to come." 
     That's worth considering. This is a long-haul situation, where seismic forces are driving the world in a direction, and we have to, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, ride this strange torpedo to the end. 
     You read about these situations, in history books usually before wars. Suddenly the old order, which worked for so long, is repudiated. New passions are stirred. The lowest echelons rise up and claim control. I can't get too upset about Trump wishing women were back in the kitchen, their existence not diluting the value of his Time magazine honor—which, at the risk of falling into a trope, was extended to Hitler in 1938, Stalin in 1939. But I'm saving that outrage for when we start nosing into war with China. Though it might be argued that the cataclysm is necessary, it's what brings people to their senses, when they'll look up and go, "Oh, we elected a brittle baby with no knowledge and no curiosity. That was probably a bad thing."
    So a practiced numbness.  And not without cause. The most terrifying aspect of Trumpism, for me, is how news, facts and discourse are all undercut, debased. You can't inform and you can't argue, because they reject you prima facie. It's like watching a horror movie. The audience can scream "Look out! Don't go into the barn!" all they like, but those on screen won't hear them.
     The only hope is for them to eventually figure it out for themselves when the fact of where Trump is going  emerges. And for that to happen, he has to get there. I hate to say it, but I think we have to hit the canyon floor first.
     That sounds defeatist. But all the various deus ex machina miracles people are hoping for—the Electoral college fails to validate the election—are just that, miracles. Impossible pipe dreams. We're strapped in, and the roller coaster car is clicking up that first, enormous hill. I just can't start screaming my head off right now, because I sense that's coming whether I scream, stay silent or, as I've been doing, gaze with fixed horror as the amusement park grows more distant and that first downward plunge draws ever nearer. It's going to get a lot worse than this, and fast.

Saturday fun activity: where IS this?

     Careful Facebook readers might know I've been downstate earlier this week, working on my column for Monday. But I sort of fudged where I was. I did take a lunch break and walk through this old building. It isn't a residence. So what is it?
     To be honest, I wasn't thinking of the contest when I took the picture. Had I been, I might have framed the building a little better. It drifts off to the right. Normally, I'd have a few shots so one might turn out. But this time, I merely trudged out to almost the proper distance, turned, and snapped one picture. It was cold.
     Still, it will serve our purpose. I imagine someone will nail it at 7:01 a.m.
      The prize is going to be one of the 2015 posters -- with the year waning, I've decided it's time to retire those, to remove them from sale, take the ads down from the blog page, to make room for more paying advertisers (hint, hint). It's one thing to reference them a year later, to cite 2015 in 2016. Another for them to linger as the years click on, like guests at a party who won't leave when the host starts doing the dishes. An air of sorrow creeps in. So if you don't win today, yet want one, but have been delaying for whatever reason, because that's what people do, order in the next few weeks or lose your chance.
     Have you seen this rectangular pile of Jacksonian Era bricks? Where is it? Place your guesses below. Good luck.

John Glenn: astronaut, hero, guy who got Kennedy to put on a hat.

     John Glenn passed away Thursday. The astronaut and senator was a true American hero.  I had the honor of interviewing him once, and it says something about his regular guy demeanor—he was an Ohioan, after all—that he agreed to speak with me about an obscure episode in his life related to hats and John F. Kennedy. The story appears in a truly odd book, my history of the decline of men's headwear as told through the life of Kennedy, "Hatless Jack." 

     The hatters lobbied Kennedy, but they were too sophisticated to try to physically slap a hat on the president's head. Not all his guests were that savvy. The most routine White House ceremonies were a cause of concern for Kennedy.
     "Kennedy had a horror of hats," Sidey wrote. "He had an even greater horror of being forced to don the unorthodox headdresses of visiting delegations."
     Kennedy's military aide, Major general Chester Clifton, recalled a worried Kennedy taking him aside and seeking reassurance before the visit of a group of Native Americans in the Rose Garden.
     "They're not going to give me a bunch of feathers to wear, are they?" Kennedy asked.
     Whether Kennedy wore a proffered hat or not was definitely a function of who was making the attempt. While Kennedy did not want to be crowned by just anybody, if the situation was right, he would permit it to happen. The president had enormous respect for Colonel John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. Kennedy had been worried about the flight, going so far as to invite Glenn to the White House beforehand to talk about safety. When Friendship 7 later made its three and a half revolutions around the earth, there was indeed great concern that the heat shield had come loose, which would have doomed Glenn to a fiery death upon reentry.
     But the shield held. Glenn survived his flight—for which he received an extra $245 in flight pay—to become the greatest American aviation hero since Charles Lindbergh. A relieved Kennedy hurried to Florida to congratulate Glenn in person and pin the Distinguished Service medal on him.
     Kennedy, Glenn, the astronaut's family, and various NASA officials then toured the space facility, in a hectic scene, a "crush of reporters, photographers, Secret Service men, spectators and employees."
     There was a small presentation at Launch Pad 14. Glenn produced a green hard hat that the base manager had given him. It was like those worn by the launch crew, except emblazoned "J.F. Kennedy, President, U.S.A." and "John Glenn, First Manned Orbital Flight, 2-20-62" (conveniently forgetting Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man—albeit a Russian—to orbit the earth) along with a painting of a globe surrounded by three orbits. He presented it to Kennedy.
    "This will make him an honorary member of the launch crew," said Glenn. Kennedy put the helmet on and then removed it. "Glad to have you aboard, sir," Glenn said.
     The most interesting aspect of this particular encounter is that it reminds us of the power of image to corrupt impressions of history. Even though Kennedy undoubtedly wore the helmet—there are photographs of him wearing it—by the time the episode reached one memoir, it had been massaged so as to fit Kennedy's reputation.
     "There was a bit of byplay as Glenn, knowing JFK's aversion to funny hats, tried and failed, as so many had failed before him, to put a hard hat on his head," wrote William Manchester in a book about his years with Kennedy.
     Glenn, incidentally, denies knowing about Kennedy's dislike of hats or trying to put one on him mischievously. "I wasn't aware of his aversion to hats or anything," he said. "I didn't know anything of it. I just put it on, thinking it was okay."
    Glenn said it was spontaneous act of his part.
    "We were out showing him the launch pad and on the pad out there normally everyone is required to wear a hard hat," Glenn said. So when we got out there, standing there, I just put it on him ... He wore it for a little while. he didn't take it off immediately."

"The mind may be at rest...."

    "What moves you if the senses do not spur? Light moves you."                                                                         —Dante, Purgatorio

    Driving south on 57, just before Champaign, I noticed the engine light was on. The engine light had never, to my memory, come on, not in the 11 years we've had the Honda Odyssey. I had driven about 150 miles and had another 100 miles to go. The last thing I wanted was to break down in Southern Illinois, land of pick-up trucks, both Chevy AND Ford.

"With this, my mind withdrew into itself, with what imagining might bring to it."

     I got off the highway at University Avenue. At a gas station, I plugged "What does the engine light on a Honda Odyssey mean?" into Google and found a bunch of articles damning the vagueness of the signal. It could mean anything from a faulty oxygen sensor to a balky catalytic converter to a loose gas cap. I got out and tightened the gas cap. The light stayed on. But none of the meanings seemed to be something serious enough to strand a person in downstate Illinois. That was reassuring.

     "Ye shall gather some useful fruit from our delaying here." 

     Still, better safe than sorry. I used my iPhone to locate the local Champaign Honda dealer and phoned their service department. The mechanic could, he said, run a diagnostic. It would cost $110 and take 90 minutes. That 90 minutes was the problem. I had a story to sniff out, and didn't want to take the time.
    "But it's not something pressing?" I said, half asking, half suggesting. "It can wait until I get back to Chicago. It'll last another couple hundred miles?"
     He said that yes, it could wait. "If the engine light isn't flashing, you're okay," he said. I was reassured—there was a level of warning more dire than this one—and decided I would continue on my way, and let the Odyssey fall into the strong arms of Muller Honda when I return.

    "Everyone apprehends dimly, and craves a good at which a mind maybe be at rest."  

    Tell it, my brother. I was listening to Heathcote Williams read Dante's "Purgatorio" -- Dante is always relevant. "Promise much, but deliver little," a sufferer tells Dante in "Inferno," summarizing the advice that landed him in Hell. (Maybe his timing was off; the same strategy landed Donald Trump in the White House).
     But I smiled slightly, hearing the faintest echo of my engine light saga in the Divine Comedy — Canto 17, for those keeping track. It made me wonder whether the relevance is there at all, or something that I layer over it, trying to justify the time spent listening.  Not that it's necessary. The words are enough. 
  
     

     
   

Pearl Harbor memory lingers, an echo of love and loss

    Stanley Swiontek played the clarinet, and it might have cost him his life.
     The Chicagoan was a cook on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor which, like many ships, had a band. On Dec. 6, 1941, there was a contest, and the Arizona band came in second, earning Swiontek the right to sleep in on Sunday morning.
     So when the Japanese surprise attack came, and a bomb hit the Arizona, sinking the battleship in nine minutes, Swiontek, instead of being at work and perhaps safe, was in his bunk, deep below decks.  

Rick Martinotti

     Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Five out of six sailors aboard the Arizona died that day. Swiontek’s family never learned what happened to their Stanley. His body was never recovered — it is still entombed with 947 shipmates aboard the sunken Arizona, now a national shrine.
      Franklin D. Roosevelt famously dubbed Dec. 7 "a day which will live in infamy." And it has. But 75 years is a long time. Even infamy fades. The remaining Pearl Harbor survivors — a few thousand — are in their 90s. The smallest child to hear the shock of that Sunday afternoon radio bulletin is at least 80 now.
     Which is not to say that subsequent generations are untouched. For the families of those affected, the attack and the 2,403 American lives it cost resonate still, a lingering echo of love and loss.
     Begin with parents like Swiontek's mother Victoria, a Polish immigrant, who saved every letter Stanley wrote home, in cursive.

To continue reading, click here.

Stuff I love: Red Wing boots

     Six inches of snow fell on Chicago Sunday, a record for Dec. 4. Much of it was still around Monday, slushy and wet, and I decided to break out my Red Wing Boots for the first time this season.     

     The boots helped. Not so much navigating downtown, which was fairly clear. But with the psychological boost a good pair of footwear can bring. Monday was also the day that the nascent Trump administration announced it is naming Dr. Ben Carson, he of the mumbled, almost gnostic idiocies, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. Another grim milestone in the reckless administration of a reckless man loading up on idiots for our collective tumble over the cliff. 

     Or not. We've been in ominous times before and somehow struggled through, intact. The boots harkened back to another worrisome year, 2009, when the economy had cratered and the new president, a novice senator who talked a good game but had not yet proven himself, had yet to bring it back. I was expecting the paper to close at any moment, and the time seemed right for a sturdy pair of boots. I wrote about it, in a column that, in retrospect seems surprisingly candid, almost fragile. Anyway, now, at a similarly bleak — aw heck, at a whole lot bleaker — moment in our national saga, seems an apt time to revisit it. Back then my column was divided into sections, and I've left those section markers in, including the concluding joke. I figure, we could all use a joke about now.

OPENING SHOT

     "Why don't you wear jeans?" my wife suggested, as I stood puzzling in front of the open closet. "You're a writer, you can wear jeans. You look good in jeans."
     It was a few hours before I had to appear on a panel at the Printers Row Event Formerly Known As a Book Fair (I just can't call it a Lit Fest).
     Even I wasn't going to wear a business suit to an outdoor fair on a Saturday morning in June, but was thinking maybe khakis, a sports coat.
     But why not blue jeans? The world's falling apart anyway. And if my wife says it's OK, it's OK. I stood there pondering, which she must have taken as paralysis.
     "Why don't you wear your Red Wing boots?" she added, soothingly. "Then you'll be ready for anything."
     That shocked me. It's one thing, I thought, slowly reaching for the high black jump boots, to nurture an irrational private notion. It's something else entirely when your significant other catches your odd occult beliefs from you, and begins repeating them back as if they made sense.

'DOWN THE DARKENED HALL'

     A person should not let his actions be dictated by song lyrics.
     I know that. Songs are not speaking to you, directly. They are written by people you don't know, under vastly different circumstances from your own. They are made up, and not guides to behavior. I know that.
     And yet.
     Once, decades ago, I was driving alone down a deserted stretch of southwestern highway, when I saw a sign announcing Winslow, Ariz. -- I impulsively took the exit and soon found myself in the center of a small town where I parked and stood, briefly, on a lonely street corner. No girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me, as happens in the Eagles song.
     But had one wanted to, I was right there.
     And then. A few months ago, I drove to Rogan's Shoes in Buffalo Grove because the Web site for Red Wing Shoes says Rogan is a Red Wing dealer. I had decided to buy a pair of Red Wing boots because . . . God, this is embarrassing . . . because in the Tom Waits song "Ruby's Arms," he says, "All I need is my Red Wing boots, and my leather jacket."
     I had just bought a leather jacket — brown, simple, no buckles, something Woody Guthrie might wear — so the boots seemed the next logical step. Then I would have all I need. And with the coming economic apocalypse, one never knows when one might be, oh, part of a line of refugees walking west. A good pair of steel-toed boots might come in handy.
     Red Wing boots are made on the banks of the Red Wing River in Red Wing, Minn. Or so I assumed, figuring that would explain the $180-a-pair price tag, twice as much as boots made by slaves in China.
     At that price, it couldn't be an impulse buy. Not for me. I tried the boots on, wandered the store for 20 minutes. Then went home for a week and thought about it, then came back a second time, with my wife for moral support. She has none of the psycho-buying-stuff hang-ups that I do.
     "They fit? Buy 'em," she shrugged. So I did, thinking that between the boots, the leather jacket, and the bracing narrative of the Tom Waits song, now I was indeed ready for anything. Let the economy totter.
     It was in the parking lot, heading for the car, box of boots in hand, that I ran "Ruby's Arms" through my mind one more time for reassurance. "All I need is my railroad boots," he plainly sings, "and my leather jacket."
     "Railroad boots" -- not "Red Wing boots." What was I thinking? I stopped cold. I almost whipped around and hurried back into the store to return the boots. But what would I say? "These aren't the boots in the song"? Besides, I have a rule that I don't do that kind of thing anymore — I make decisions and stick with them, lest my life devolve into a nightmare of action, regret and retraction.
     Tell me this lyrics idiocy isn't a unique failing of my own. Please. There must be other people who do things because of songs. Who happen to be in Memphis and beeline — as I did — to Charles Vergo's alley restaurant, The Rendezvous, simply because John Hiatt sings: "At least we can get a decent meal, down at the Rendezvous" in "Memphis in the Meantime."
     Who finds satisfaction the way I did in realizing that Tom Waits does mention the boots in a different song, "Mr. Siegel" ("I shot the morning in the back, with my Red Wings on. . .")
     Frankly, I write the entire episode off to stress over the economy. I can't control what's happening in America. My pair of boots was made in the good old U.S. of A., though Red Wing informs me that about half of their footwear is now made in China. Nothing to be done about that. But you can make sure you have good boots. Maybe that'll help.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

      The little boy put on his own shoes for the first time and ran to show his mother.
     "Sweetie," she cooed. "That's wonderful. But you've got your shoes on the wrong feet."
     He looked down in confusion and horror, then up at his mother.
     "But mommy," he said, his lower lip starting to tremble. "These are the only feet I've got!"
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 8, 2009

Refute Trump's lies with force and alacrity

Samuel Johnson

     George Berkeley was an Irish cleric — the Bishop of Cloyne — and philosopher. His 1709 "An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision" promoted "immaterialism," the idea that physical objects do not actually exist but are merely perceived. The world isn't all houses and stones, just light and color.
     I mention this as part of my broad-minded attempt to give Donald Trump and his supporters the benefit of the doubt. The idea that there is no reality, no facts, that all is subjective perception was not invented by them, though they certainly have seized the Berkeley viewpoint in what is already being called our "post-fact world."
     Last week, Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN contributor and Trump supporter, phoned a Washington, D.C., public radio station that was discussing Trump's baseless claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election. Hughes argued that these deliberate fabrications were not "lies," but merely differing views. She said:
     “I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other hand, there are many people that go, 'No, it’s true.' And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. "
     How to reply? I could point out that this is patently false and give an illustration: millions of children believe in Santa Claus, yet that does not will him into physical being.
     But Trumpian thinking — and remember, his logic is not about perceiving reality, but obscuring it — dismisses this as just another opinion, and one from the mainstream media at that. (His whole lying media schtick is not based on any media lies, but on a kill-the-messenger attempt to shut up those pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.)

    To continue reading, click here.

No Royko

     On Friday, Mark Konkol wrote a column about "Out of the Wreck I Rise," and on Saturday Scott Simon featured it on NPR, and suddenly the book rose to No. 36 among top sellers on Amazon. OMFG, as the kids say. I wanted to link here to Mark's column, and link to Scott's interview. I figured I should also write something, though what I ended up with is only tangentially connected with either of these pieces. What's the connection? I suppose it's that I know both guys, and that their drawing attention to my book and me trying as a matter of policy not to be a jerk to colleagues, or at least my struggling to restrain my jerkish tendencies, are not unconnected.

     Mike Royko hated younger columnists, because he viewed them as competition. Which was silly, because they certainly were not competition, given the singular place he occupied—and occupies still, almost two decades after his death—at the summit of Chicago journalism. 
     Among the many blessings in my life is the insight that you don't have to try to be Mike Royko—some guys never grasped that, and their misfortune is on the page. When readers, as they sometimes do, write to snidely inform me that I'm no Mike Royko, I surprise them, I imagine, by thanking them, and pointing out that, given Royko was a mean drunk whose son ended up robbing a bank, not being Rokyo isn't the stark fate they imagine, certainly not as rough as being him seemed to be.
     It has also made me reflexively nice to new writers and reporters, because I remember the disappointment I had the handful of times I actually interacted with Royko, how I would have given anything for a kind word, and never got anything close. Just the opposite. Once he threatened to break my legs. Not in a joshing way, but as in an I'm-the-guy-who'll-break-y0ur-legs way. A story for another day.
     Trying to avoid that, I say hello to young reporters, compliment them on their writing when possible. Their good work doesn't diminish me, it enhances my experience as a reader and makes the profession we're all in more valuable. As I once told my late pal Jeff Zaslow, success is not a pie—your getting a bigger slice doesn't make my slice smaller. I'm glad there are so many good columnists in Chicago. Over at the Tribune, Eric Zorn, always a thoughtful and engaging writer, has been on fire since the advent of Trump. Lately, in my column, I'm torn between the need to raise the alarm and the need to comfort the alarmed, and when I'm doing the latter, I feel less guilty knowing that Eric's concentrating his fire on the target undistracted. Rick Kogan is the city made human flesh and among my most reliable friends—and, I should point out, someone who was very good friend of, and a golfing partner with, Royko, a reminder that Royko could be very kind to people who weren't me and frantic little would-be parvenues like me. Others at the Trib: Mary Schmich is ruminative, Rex Huppke often manages that toughest of tasks, to be genuinely funny. 
     How could admitting that be anything but a sign of confidence? There are more. At the Sun-Times, I appreciate Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, the obits of Maureen O'Donnell, the reviews of Richard Roeper, the celebrity insights of Bill Zwecker, Rick Telander in sports—I could go on and on, and hope my colleagues forgive me for not including them, but I have to think of the reader first, and lists tend to grow tiresome.
     I haven't even mentioned online. There are years when I turn my head and spit when speaking Robert Feder's name—he did once compare me to the lunatic Jay Mariotti, which is the height of unfairness—but he still owns the media beat, and if I walked past Tribune Tower and saw workmen tearing it down with crowbars I would hurry to Feder to find out What the Hell Just Happened. 
     Which leads to my former colleague, Mark Konkol, now at DNA Info, whom I remember back to when he was one of the youngsters on the staff at Red Streak, the free training wheels newspaper we rushed out, in a truly dramatic show of Front Page daring, to steal the thunder from the Tribune's new kiddie paper, Red Eye. Konkol had the fire—most people, even most reporters, just phone it in. You could just tell he wanted it, whatever it was. During the last mayoral election, he did a column—he was in Chuy Garcia's house, chatting with him, that I remember reading, and thinking, "Wow, that's how it's supposed to be done."
     Anyway, I haven't been able to hang with Mark as much as I'd like, since he's off scaling the heights of Hollywood, and several times I had to manfully suppress the urge to pick up the phone and snarl, "Where the fuck are you?" My patience was rewarded Friday, with Mark's spot-on column about my book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. I'll let you in on a secret. Sales are nice. But what an author really wants is for someone to Get It. And while the page 4 notice in the Sunday New York Times Book Review was nice, and the full page review in the Toronto Star was nice, those authors did not grasp the book in front of them. Especially the Star, whose review called the book "a pub crawl," which left me pounding the heel of my hand against my forehead.
    Mark got it. He really did. If you haven't seen his Friday column from DNA Info, here it is.  The only thing better than reading a really good column by a fellow columnist is reading a really good column by a fellow columnist about a book that you wrote and love. 

Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake

Proof that we not only talk the talk, we walk the walk: Eli's cheesecakes set out for Ross's high school graduation party.

    Howdy folks. Enjoying the blog? Good, good. Glad you like it. I certainly enjoy writing it.
    Although. One drawback of the quality journalism you've come to expect here is that people tend to start reading, immediately, just jump right on in, and then are carried away, rapt, into my column, and perhaps never notice the advertisement on the side.
    Can't blame them. There's only the one. But it is an important one.
    So I'd like to direct your attention to the left, to the new December ad by the blog's sponsor, Eli's Cheesecake. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the company site where you'll be able to order tasty, wholesome, nutritious Eli's cheesecake for yourself, your friends and your family.
    Why? Well, because it's delicious, for starters. But more than that. We live in perilous times. And as our nation deteriorates into a disordered, Manichean and uncivilized place, we are going to increasingly rely on the relief offered by basic creature comforts such as Eli's cheesecake. As difficult as it is to see Trump naming a Mardi Gras parade of fanatics, wash-outs and incompetents to his cabinet, as painful as it will be to see environmental regulations cast aside, Medicare gutted, and the civil liberties of Americans and hardworking immigrant residents ignored, the route ahead will be all the more challenging if there is nothing good in the house for dessert. The quality of our national discourse, our American pride and our cherished freedoms might slip, precipitously, but the quality of Eli's cheesecake? Never.
    So stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into by stunts such as talking to the Taiwanese president in contravention of 40 years of tradition. We might all be living on canned food and squirrels caught in snares in 2018. But right now you can survive on peppermint cheesecake — doesn't just the thought of that make the four-year infamy that our nation must endure just a little less of a doorjamb-gnawing flash of unspeakable woe?
    If not for yourself, think of your friends, perhaps in distant cities, still reeling at the stab to the soul that the past election represented, frightened folks whose bleak December days could be enlivened by a dark chocolate banana cheesecake from Eli's, or a salted caramel halavah cheesecake, or red velvet cheesecake.
    Wait. Back up. My God. Did I say salted caramel halavah cheesecake? I did. You've never had that in your life, have you? Admit it. You never even heard of it. But now that you have, you won't be able to get it out of your mind. Salted. Caramel. Halavah. Cheesecake.
    Though the enticing effect might be lessened among those who don't quite know what halavah is (fantastic candy made of ground sesame seeds adored by us swarthy Semitic tribes).  Just the thought of salted caramel halavah cheesecake is the spark relighting the beacon of hope that was recently extinguished by the political micturition of 60 million fellow citizens. America didn't reach this point by caving into tyrants, foreign OR domestic. We approach life with the same sense of possibility that lead us, in only 50 years, from the bland yellow disc of a Sara Lee cheesecake to the multi-cultural splendor and deliciousness of an Eli's Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake, which you can order right now by clicking here. Do it for yourself or, if not for yourself, for a friend or, if those two imposing beneficiaries don't shake open your wallet, do it for me. I write this stuff every day without asking you to do anything but read it and, now, to buy a cheesecake. For yourself. For a friend. Or hell, for me. Send me the Salted Caramel Halavah Cheesecake. 
    Because even if you can no longer rely on the president or the press, on Congress or the basic decency of your neighbors, this blog and Eli's cheesecake will never let you down. And that's something.

Rising of The Chicago Sun in 1941 casts shadows today

     

     The most surprising thing is how familiar it all feels.
     Not the cover price: 2 cents. Nor the mobs of Chicagoans who waited in the streets at midnight to throw their pennies at harried newsboys and strip bundles of newspapers off the trucks before they stopped rolling. Certainly not the mayor and the governor and the three newsreel cameras on hand to watch the presses roll.

The known world, according to Col .McCormick

     But 75 years ago this Sunday, when The Chicago Sun, the predecessor of this newspaper, hit the streets in the early hours of Dec. 4, 1941, war might have been raging from the British Isles to Moscow to Malaysia. But people were still people, Americans were still Americans, cynical, divided, contentious, patriotic, devious concerning what was not yet called The Mainstream Media, treating it as both quarterback and tackling dummy.
     The Sun was a paper with a purpose: to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his conviction that we had to get involved in a war that Americans wanted to avoid. A Gallup poll found 88 percent of Americans were against fighting the Nazis. What debate there was focused on how much we should help our allies and how prepared we should be -- half felt we needed to mobilize for the inevitable; the other half felt that doing so would only antagonize Mr. Hitler.
    In Chicago, Col. Robert McCormick ran his Tribune as the voice of isolation, a kind of 1940s Fox News. The Trib was "savage in its attacks upon all liberals and everyone with whom it disagreed" according to media critic Oswald Garrison Villard, who noted the Tribune endorsed the Klu Klux Klan while taking a dim view of these unwashed foreigners some thought we ought to  shed American blood to protect.
     "On international questions the Tribune has generally been cynical, reactionary, militaristic and jingo," Villard noted in 1943, explaining how McCormick's idea of sane foreign policy was to annex Mexico "without hesitation" in order to "impose our superior morality upon the Mexicans," and that a United Nations was unnecessary since other countries could merely join the U.S. as new states — white countries, of course.
     The Trib was only the most extreme of the four Chicago papers. At the august Daily News, the publisher, Frank Knox, backed the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee, a front group secretly backed by the German government, insisting, in a very Trumpian fashion, that European nations settle the $14 billion they still owed the U.S. from WWI before any further assistance was considered. The Chicago Times was a scrappy, pro-FDR tabloid, but considered a photo-driven lightweight. And the American was a Hearst rag obsessing over ax murders and love nests.
     Into this strode our unlikely hero, Marshall Field III. Inheritor of nearly $200 million in 1940 dollars, he had a 13,000-acre plantation in South Carolina, a six-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue, a summer home in Maine, a yacht, a third wife, and a guilty liberal conscience. In 1940, he founded PM, a New York city newspaper that raised eyebrows by being printed on quality paper stock and refusing to accept advertising.
     A newspaper needs a name, and a contest was held. The winner, Russell Trenholme, received $5,000 for "The Chicago Sun," explaining his entry: "When morning comes you look for two things to make your world right: you look for the sun and sunlight, and you look for your morning paper for the truth of what's going on in the world."
     The paper was greeted with delight in Washington. "Isn't this wonderful?" FDR gushed, waving a copy — and with fanatical opposition by the Trib, which not only threatened news vendors who dared carry it, but blackballed the Sun from joining the Associated Press, a case that went up to the Supreme Court.
     Others were less hostile, though noting that neither international news nor editorial direction were what made or broke a newspaper.
     "The future of the Chicago Sun might ultimately depend upon some little comic-strip twirp presenting as much nauseating morality . . . as Little Orphan Annie," Edwin A. Lahey wrote in the Daily News.
     That first issue sold 263,000 copies. Three days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That edition sold 896,000 copies, but the Sun's main reason for being vanished overnight, as the Tribune spun on a dime and was as enthusiastic for war as it had been for accommodating Hitler.
     The Sun soldiered on, though it never made money, a reminder that hard times in the newspaper business are not new either (the Villard quote comes from a 1943 book entitled "The Disappearing Daily"). The Sun merged with the Times early in 1948, making this paper, through its second bloodline, older than the Tribune, since the Times is a descendent of the Chicago Journal, founded in 1844.
     One more point before we let the Sun set for another 25 years.
     The headline on that first edition of the Sun, a broadsheet, was "REVOLT GROWS IN SERBIA."
     The Tribune's headline that day was: "F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS!"
     An isolationist Army captain had stolen contingency plans from the War Plans Division and passed them on to arch-isolationist Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, who gave them to the Tribune, which brandished them as "irrefutable evidence that that American intervention in the war was planned and imminent." The Germans adjusted their own strategy accordingly.
     Which eerily echoes WikiLeaks, with one very, very important distinction. After the war plans were published, the White House was asked what action would be taken against those publishing the state secrets.
     "Your right to print the news is, I think, unchallenged and unquestioned," White House press secretary Stephan Early said. "It depends entirely on the decision of the publisher and editor whether publication is patriotic or treasonable."