Handcuff Harry and Tailgunner Joe

 Sept 10, 2012

I knew this was coming up, but I'd forgotten that Saturday marked the exact day when Jimmy Carter bested Herbert Hoover as the president with the longest life after his presidency. As the Atlantic article points out, September 8, 2012, was President Carter's 11,544th day as former President Carter, or nearly 32 years. Here's hoping he has some more post-presidential days.

The History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, Wisconsin, started out as a Masonic Temple, but now focuses on local history. Such as the previously mentioned Harry Houdini, master of escape and self-promotion, who has a whole floor devoted to him and his illusions. How is it that the former Erik Weisz (Ehrich Weiss) called Appleton his hometown? "Houdini came to America as a four-year-old boy in 1878," the museum web site says. "His parents moved him and his brothers to Appleton because of a job opening. Houdini's father, Meyer Samuel Weiss, became the community's first rabbi."

But the young Ehrich Weiss left Appleton with his family when he was only seven, after his father lost his job, moving to New York. So "hometown" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently Houdini claimed the town as his own, even asserting that he'd been born there instead of Budapest. Still, Appleton's a good place for such an exhibit, and the museum does well with it, featuring photos of Houdini during his performances, but also more casual shots; handbills and posters; and plenty of Houdini equipment, such as handcuffs and shackles and confining spaces, like a milk can and a simulated Chinese water torture box.

Various exhibits discuss how some of the escapes were done, which apparently upset some current illusionists -- such as David Copperfield, who owns a lot of Houdini artifacts himself -- as if all the information was somehow not on the Internet. There was also an exhibit, complete with seance table, explaining how some of those tricks were done, just as spiritualist debunker Houdini did during his lifetime.

The museum isn't all Houdini. The lower floors feature exhibits about local history, including an assortment of machines made or used in the area. One was a genuine early 20th-century Linotype machine. Considering how ubiquitous they once were, it's odd how few of them I've run across. Maybe I'm not looking in the right museums.

Right at the foot of the stairs in the basement is a bronze bust in a clear display case. "People ask us why we keep a bust of Joseph McCarthy," our guide said, anticipating the question. "Like him or not, he's part of our history." Sounds reasonable; he was born in Grand Chute, near Appleton, and is buried at St. Mary's Parish Cemetery in Appleton, which wasn't on my press tour. No point in pretending he didn't exist.

There's One Under Every Bed

The early spring means greening grass, but most of the trees are holding off. For all I know, it's the hours of daylight that touch of their leafing, not the ambient temperature. Mostly. A few are budding. Are they the bold pioneers in the arboral realm, or recklessly impatient? Thinking like that only goes to show that there's nothing than can't be anthropomorphized.

It's also the season of robocalls. At least until tomorrow, when Illinois holds its primary. The calls were pretty thick today, including the following, which my answering machine recorded and which I will transcribe verbatim, after the part in which the two speakers on the call introduced themselves. Why? It might be of interest someday when scholars ponder the opinions of the trog right at this moment in history.

First, a male and female voice introduce themselves by name, with the man identifying himself as a "Jew from Massachusetts." Then the woman says, "I'm a Christian from California. If you believe, as we do, that marriage and sexuality should only be between a man and a woman, please help us stop Mitt Romney."

Male voice: "As governor, Romney started gay youth pride day proclamations, promoted homosexuality in our elementary schools, and unconstitutionally ordered officials to make Massachusetts America's first same-sex marriage state."

Female voice: "Romney supports open homosexuality in the military, appointment of homosexual judges, and the ENDA law, making it illegal to fire a man who wears a dress and high heels to work, even if he's your child's teacher."

Male voice: "When you vote tomorrow, please vote for social sanity and Rick Santorum, not for homosexuality and Mitt Romney."

Female voice: "Rick Santorum is the only candidate who can be trusted to uphold traditional marriage, a straight military, and the rights of American children to have both a mother and a father."

Male voice: "This message paid for by Jews and Christians Together Dot Org," after which he gave a phone number.

This isn't a political blog, but for crying out loud. Is this what the Grand Old Party is coming to? The party of Lincoln and TR and Eisenhower and even Nixon and Reagan? The rational members of the party better hope not. To paraphrase Sgt. Bat Guano, some of these "core" constituents are all worked up imagining that the nation's deviated preverts are organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Well, I suppose it's tough to be on the losing side of social change, and not to have any real justification for reinstating the old prejudices.

Spiritual Super PACs

Practically May-like today. A warm sun was out, crocuses bloomed, and a few insects buzzed around my face.

Yesterday I passed through a nearby suburban train station and took a look at the give-away book rack, to see if there was anything beyond the usual bodice-rippers. There was -- a thin volume called The Next President. Subtitle: "Spiritual interviews with the Guardian Spirits of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum." By one Ryuho Okawa, published by Happy Science Publishing.

Time to go to Wiki: "Happy Science (幸福の科学, Kōfuku-no-Kagaku?) is a new religious and spiritual movement founded in Japan on 6 October 1986 by Ryuho Okawa with over 12 million followers in 85 countries [citation needed]."

By golly, it's a cult -- I mean, new Japanese religion, one of a multitude -- with an inside track into the guardian spirits of Republican U.S. presidential candidates. Wonder how those interviews were set up. Do you contact the spirit's celestial PR firm first?

Why doesn't Ron Paul rate a guardian spirit interview? I can't imagine that the guardians are public entities, so consulting them doesn't go against the philosophy of libertarianism. Maybe to show his independence, Rep. Paul turned down help from the spirit world. Stranger things have happened this campaign season.

Commie Plots

Forest Home Cemetery, part of which is the old German cemetery Waldheim, is gorgeous in fall. This is what it looked like on Wednesday at about noon.

It's also the location of the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert, which I mentioned recently. I last visited in 2002, despite the fact that I drive by the cemetery periodically on the Eisenhower Expressway, along with thousands of other motorists.

I didn't have a lot of time for yesterday's visit, but I did want to find a few permanent residents that I'd missed before, such as that all-purpose early 20th-century radical, Emma Goldman. I don't know how I missed her memorial when I first visited the Haymarket monument, since it's only a few feet away. A stone's throw, if you're in a reactionary mood. Anyway, this is her memorial.

And a close up of the bas-relief of her by sculptor Jo Davidson, who did a lot of portraiture -- quite a list.

Next to Emma Goldman are a cluster of plain, rectangular stones, marking the final resting places of other, lesser-known radicals. Most of the stones included fitting epitaphs. Among others, there was:

Elizabeth G. Flynn "The Rebel Girl" • Fighter For Working Class Emancipation

William Z. Foster Working Class Leader • Tireless Fighter for Socialism

Eugene Dennis Communist Leader • Fighter for Working Class Internationalism

Jack Johnstone A Life Dedicated to Human Freedom

Sylvia Woods Heroine in the Struggle

Wish I could have stayed longer. Sometime I want to hunt up Billy Sunday and Samuel Gompers, and spend a little more time looking at the funerary art.

The Special Envoy Selects His Ice Cream

I attended a day-long conference at a hotel in downtown Chicago today and listened to a number of speakers, some talking about commercial real estate, others about the wider economy. Some were more interesting than others, as usual for these events.

After the lunchtime program, I took the opportunity to shake George Mitchell's hand. As in former Senator and Special Envoy George Mitchell, who was one of the luncheon speakers, and an intensely interesting one at that. He managed, for example, to describe the Arab-Israeli conflict in a way that was worth listening to, rather than being the same retreads about that situation that you hear ad nauseum.

At the moment I approached him, he was considering which kind of ice cream bar he wanted for dessert. Rather than serve dessert at the tables, the event provided it outside the ballroom, a selection of pastries, cookies and Dove Bars.

I didn't interrupt him for long. Just long enough to express some admiration for some of the work he's done for his country (and baseball, though I didn't mention it). He thanked me and that was that. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to take his picture.

I did, however, take pictures of the other lunchtime speakers, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen (Republican) and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (Democrat). Daschle, obviously used to such attention, assumed that I would want to pose with him as well as taking his picture, so I did. The pic was taken by another journalist I know who was also attending the event.

That's more former federal government officials than I've ever met in one day.

Now is the Perfect Time to Panic

Someone with a nom de net "blackton" posted this in the comments section of a New Republic article yesterday. How often are online comments so literate? (Even though I had to fix a few bits of punctuation.)

Into the shadow of default rode the 242

Half a government half a government,
Half a government onward,
All in the valley of Default
Rode the 242:
"Forward, the Tea Brigade!
"Charge for the Dems!" he said:
Into the valley of Default
Rode the 242.

Tax cuts to right of them,
Tax cuts to left of them,
Tax cuts in front of them
Cantor'd & Boehner'd;
Limbaugh'd at with snot and smell,
Crazy they rode, not well,
Into the jaws of Default,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the 242.

Apologies to Lord Tennyson

With any luck this will soon be just an amusing comment from an uncertain period in U.S. history, not a bitter reminder of the cheerful summer days before the Panic of 2011.

The Rent is Always Too Damn High

This time I marked a paper ballot for voting. Each election, the method is different. I noticed that the Rent is Too Damn High Party didn't field any candidates in Illinois. Or as it says on the New York ballot, Rent is 2 Damn High. Seems to be only New York. In other parts of the country, the concept could also be repositioned as the Mortgage is Too Damn High.

In fact there weren't too many minor parties or independents represented on my ballot, just a scattering of Libertarians and Greens and a handful of independents. Not a single neo-Whig that I noticed, and the Natural Law Party seems to be just another organization in the dustbin of third-party history. I vaguely recall that in the late 1990s, Natural Law was able to field a few candidates and even buy a little radio air time.

Once again, the polling officials at my suburban polling place were paragons of rectitude. I wasn't even offered a doughnut for my vote, which goes against the spirit of elections in Cook County. Mostly they were sitting around talking with each other, since not that many people were there at 11 am to vote. They judiciously avoided talking about politics in favor of talking about old times, and their old times went back a little further than mine. I imagine community rooms at independent-living senior housing properties see a lot of socializing like this.

RIP, Dolph Briscoe

I never met the late Gov. Dolph Briscoe, but we all have a soft spot for governors of large states during the 1970s, don't we? I would say that I hadn't thought about him in years, but it isn't so. In terms of posthumous notice, he's had the misfortune to pass at about the same time as Sen. Byrd, also a politico but more of a national figure. (Groucho Marx was likewise eclipsed in death by Elvis Presley.)

Late last summer, after posting about Gov. Briscoe and his part in the song "Freeze a Yankee," Helen V., whom I went to high school with, added this to the Facebook copy of my posting: "My husband, Terry from Vermont, used to be an AP reporter, and had an assignment to meet and interview Gov. Briscoe at his ranch in Uvalde about the soon-to-open Cactus Jack Garner Museum. I sang what I could remember from the song and asked Terry to ask Gov. Briscoe if he remembered it. Terry did and the governor politely chuckled."

Whatever Briscoe did as governor -- signing the Texas Open Records Act, for one thing -- his lasting legacy isn't that. Instead, he co-wrote the legislation that gave Texas its Farm-to-Market system of roads that remains of enormous value to agriculture and Briscoe's own cattle industry, but also good for those of us who enjoy buzzing down rural roads. From his Daily Texan obit: "Before he was governor, Briscoe served as a member of the Texas Legislature from 1949 until 1957, where he co-authored legislation creating the farm-to-market road system, which linked rural farmland to major Texas cities."

Sens. Durbin & Douglas

Sen. Dick Durbin may be distinguished as a Senator but I'm afraid his countenance isn't all that distinctive. Put him in a board room or mid- to upper-level manager's office in just about any kind of business that uses offices, and he'd fit right in. But his business happens to be governing, and I'd say he's reached upper management -- he is the Majority Whip, after all.

I'm not the sort of man who will ever have an office littered with awards and decorated by photos of me with various luminaries. For one thing, the most recent award I won was in 1983. For another, if a luminary is at hand, I'm more inclined to take a picture rather than be in it. This is Sen. Durbin and Joanna, the PR woman who invited me to the breakfast at the Halsted Pershing Business Center.

The property is on the South Side of Chicago, near the site of the former Union Stockyards. When mapping out my route to the place (no GPS for me), I noticed that the Stephen A. Douglas Tomb and Memorial wasn't all that far away. So after shaking hands with one US Senator from Illinois, I went to pay my respects to another, one with a more distinctive look about him. Or maybe that's just the 19th-century tailoring and hairstyle.

The tomb sits on a square of land right at the end of 35th Street, or perhaps the beginning. When the street plays out, a footbridge crosses Metra commuter rail lines and Lake Shore Drive to the parkland along Lake Michigan. If it had been a little warmer, I might have crossed the bridge, but a chilly wind had followed the rain, so I took a look at the tomb. This is its base, looking about as 19th century as Sen. Douglas.

There's a statue of the Little Giant atop the tomb, but it's impossible to get a good look at it without binoculars. "A larger-than-life bronze figure perches ninety-six feet in the air surveying Lake Michigan -- or preparing to dive in, according to more than one critic," says the AIA Guide to Chicago. "To offset the height, sculptor [Leonard] Volk placed allegorical figures on freestanding plinths around the vault that contains Douglas's sarcophagus. The grounds were intended for Douglas's own elegant home."

To take a picture of the upper part of the monument, I had to leave the grounds and go across the street, but it's still a distant figure. I also wondered why Sen. Douglas faces east, considering his advocacy of westward expansion. Then again, maybe he's having second thoughts about the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Illinois Knows How to Pick 'Em

Sometimes -- usually -- it takes a while to clear away the junk mail accumulation on our former dining table. Today in the pile I noticed an oversized postcard with a picture of hands exchanging cash, captioned by the words: "If You're Tired of Politics as Usual..."

On the other side of the card is the message: "Then Vote for Scott Lee Cohen. NOT a Career Politician."

And, I should add at this point, NEVER to be one. Instead he will be a punch line on late-night television for a short while.

The Tribune wrote this morning: "Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Scott Lee Cohen, a Chicago pawnbroker whose surprise primary win last week was followed by scandalous revelations about his troubled past with a prostitute ex-girlfriend, said Sunday night he would quit as nominee...

"In a steady torrent following the Tuesday primary, leading Democrats called for Cohen to step aside as new details were revealed about his relationships with his now-ex-wife while using anabolic steroids and his ex-girlfriend, convicted as a prostitute, whom he met at a massage therapy spa. Other revelations showed that as he pumped millions into his campaign, his ex-wife filed a mid-December lawsuit seeking $54,000 in back-due child support."

Voting in Cook County Ain't What it Used to Be

The election judges at my polling place today looked a little bored. It's a mid-winter primary for an off-year election, after all, and snow fell most of the morning to boot, which probably didn't inspire turnout. So I guess things were a little slow.

In fact I was the only voter there in the mid-morning. It was all on the up-and-up too. No one offered to buy my vote -- no offers of beer or doughnuts or anything. Doesn't anyone value my vote? Where's the respect for the political heritage of Cook County?

A Visit to Felony Franks

This is Felony Franks, a hot dog stand at the corner of S. Western Ave. and W. Jackson Blvd. on the West Side of Chicago, just before sunset last Friday. I went there to talk with the owner for an article I completed about the place over the weekend, and to try the food. Of course, I wasn't the first writer to cover the story. Open up a hot dog stand with a prison theme and hire ex-cons to run the place and you're going to get some attention, it seems.

Felony Franks' mascot, painted on the door and one of the walls not visible this image, is a cartoon hot dog in prison stripes and fastened to a ball and chain. I didn't get a good picture of him, but he's fairly prominent on the web site.

Note that there's no sign hanging in front of Felony Franks. The Chicago alderman in whose district the place operates does not like the name or the prison theme one little bit, and has denied permission for a sign. Something about a cartoon hot dog glorifying the criminal lifestyle. He may be on to something, considering how often cartoon hot dogs appear in gangsta rap videos.

Item From the Past: "Freeze a Yankee"

On August 25, 1978, a girl named Kathy B. broke my thumb. While I was still wearing the splint, I told people that and got weird reactions. "We were dancing," I said. That didn't seem to clarify things, since I still got weird reactions. "Really, that's what we were doing." People didn't believe it, somehow. Pretty soon I gave up explaining it.

But that's just what happened. We were at a party with a sizable number of other kids. I don't know that I was exactly dancing with Kathy, a sometime girlfriend of one of my group, though she didn't attend our high school. I was just dancing in her vicinity. She was wearing some kind of hard-soled shoes. My hand went down, her foot went up, and they made contact. I didn't find out I had a cracked knuckle until the next day, at the emergency room.

But that's not what brings that evening to mind. Someone at the party had a 45 of the song "Freeze a Yankee" and he played it for us at least once, probably a few times, and we were greatly entertained. I never heard it again after that until today, when I found it on YouTube (where else?). Occasionally over the years I'd mention the song, but no one else -- the non-Texans, that is -- had ever heard of it. The group that cut the record was from Dallas, it seems, and whatever success they had with it was mostly in Texas. For reasons that might be obvious once you listen to the song.

The Gov. Briscoe mentioned in the song is none other than Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who was in office from 1973 to 1979. I'm not sure what he might have said that inspired the lyric -- some bravado about keeping Texas oil for Texans, maybe, though I'm pretty sure the governor of Texas wouldn't have had much power to impede interstate commerce. But it may be the only song anywhere that mentions Briscoe, who is still alive and who also happens to be one of the largest landowners in the country.

Comic Governors

Yesterday's posting should have been, "auf Wiedershen, Gov. Putz." I didn't think the Illinois Senate would act quite as fast as it did, but something about convicting an impeached governor unanimously says all you need to know about the proceedings.

It made me wonder whatever happened to Evan Mecham, who counts as a footnote character of the 1980s as the governor of Arizona. He too was impeached, convicted and tossed out of office. Turns out he died almost a year ago; I must have missed his obit at the time.

Before Blago, Mecham was the most recent governor to lose his job to traditional impeachment and conviction, and provided the nation with some comic relief. Come to think of it, Blago has provided the same service for us in our troubled times.

Gov. Putz

Sometimes Yiddish is just the thing. As in the case of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a putz with an oversupply of chutzpah. Unfortunately, we're likely to hear more about him and from him in the months and years ahead, since impeachment and removal from office is only Part One. A criminal trial is next, and there's certainly a book deal for Blago after he does his minimum-security time, and probably a career for him on daytime TV too. Maybe that's what he should have done all along.

During my Japanese days, a Jewish acquaintance of mine once explained to us the difference between "schmuck" and "putz," which have the same literal meaning. If you were kidding around with a close friend, he said, you could call him a schmuck. But never a putz, if you wanted to remain friends.

It occurs to me that I'm a stone-cold philistine when it comes to American literature written after a certain time. Roughly, say, within my lifetime. I knew a girl in college who was fond of John Updike, or at least the Rabbit books. I saw the film version of The Witches of Eastwick years ago, but only recall bits and pieces now, such as what Jack Nicholson liked after lunch. But otherwise Mr. Updike's opus has made a light impression on me.

But it's not too late to buckle down and read the mid- to late-20th century titans of American literature that I've neglected, whose achievements will surely, uh, illuminate the centuries ahead. Maybe they'll will change my worldview! Spark my own personal intellectual renaissance!

Naaah.

I speak from ignorance, of course, but something about gushing posthumous praise for an artist, or anyone really, makes me skeptical. I felt the same way with the passing of David Foster Wallace. A regrettable suicide in his case, but somehow praise for him as a literature god makes me think that he was only lucky enough to be fashionable, and fashion passes. Fame isn't only fleeting, it has a half-life whose span isn't clear to contemporaries.

Snow Day, Mr. Butz

All though the early morning hours of Friday, February 1, snow fell on metro Chicago. At about 6:30 am, the phone rang. It was Lilly's room mother -- you know, I'm a little surprised that term is still used -- who left a message: no school. When there's no school, there's no preschool either, just as a matter of policy. And Yuriko has Fridays off. So we were all here for the Snow Day.

At least a foot of snow. Certain bushes near the house were all dressed up by it.

But it didn't evolve into a Snow Weekend. By Saturday morning, the roads were clear. On Sunday, I learned about the death of Earl Butz the old-fashioned way: in the newspaper.

Earl Butz. I would say that I was surprised he was still alive, but I already knew that. At some point last year, I considered a DPD posting about Secretary Butz, but didn't do it. Whatever his impact on ag policy, Earl Butz achieved one thing few, if any, Secretaries of Agriculture ever do: notice. Notoriety, in fact. Quick, who's the current secretary? Turns out that Congress only confirmed someone new to the post last week, Ed Schafer, whose name isn't on the lips of Americans far and wide.

Who remembers Butz' predecessor, Orville Freeman? His successor, John Knebel? Or the first such Secretary, appointed by President Cleveland? Norman Jay Coleman. Not me. Even a presidential buff has to look these things up (but not that Vice President Henry Wallace was once Secretary of Agriculture).

As long as the 1970s remain in living memory, however, Earl Butz will be remembered, and maybe even after that.

The October 18, 1976, issue of Time set the scene:

"En route to help dedicate a screwworm eradication plant in Mexico, Earl Butz took a plane to California just after the Republican National Convention in Kansas City... In the first-class compartment, the Agriculture Secretary spied Singers Pat Boone and Sonny Bono, and John Dean, the former White House counsel who had blown the whistle on Richard Nixon and had just worked the convention as a writer for Rolling Stone. A gregarious man who likes to flaunt his snappy country—and often barnyard—sense of humor, Butz, 67, wandered over to make idle conversation...

"Butz started by telling a dirty joke involving intercourse between a dog and a skunk. When the conversation turned to politics, Boone, a right-wing Republican, asked Butz why the party of Lincoln was not able to attract more blacks. The Secretary responded with a line so obscene and insulting to blacks that it forced him out of the Cabinet last week and jolted the whole Ford campaign."

The following also speaks to the Earl Butz legacy. It is not for children or most places of work. Amazing what turns up on YouTube.

Commencement Soap Bubbles

As I was wandering around campus trying to keep up with Ann last week, I realized that my nephew Sam’s graduation from Washington University was the first commencement ceremony I’d been to in a long time. For a while, I thought the last one I attended was my own from Vanderbilt—Friday the 13th of May, 1983—but later I remember attending my old friend Tom J’s graduation from UT Austin in May 1988.

The commencement speaker at the UT event was TV journalist Bill Moyers, who gave a good speech, though I can’t remember a particle of it. As for my own graduation, I don’t remember that there was a special commencement speaker, but there must have been. Which only confirms what anyone who sits through such a speech knows, that they have the longevity of soap bubbles.

Wash U invited Richard Gephardt, former Congressman and lead-balloon candidate for U.S. President, to be the ’05 speaker. I heard him as I might hear parts of a televised speech as I entered and left a room. Ann saw no reason to sit with the rest of us at the back of the quadrangle on one of the folding chairs provided by the university, so she set off to explore. I followed. She managed to find a set of exciting outdoor stairs—hard concrete, so I was sure some tumbling would come of it, but none did—long academic hallways (heavy doors, office-hour notices, bulletin boards, cartoons taped to the walls), an elevator usually reserved for the handicapped, sidewalks, grass, a group of commencement volunteers who cooed over her, and a basement with university workers in their cubicles, who were ignoring the thousands of people only a short distance away. In one hallway near a door leading to the quadrangle, paramedics were attending to a woman in a stretcher. She must have been about 60, a mother or grandmother or aunt or some other relation of somebody among the crowd, or all of those things to scattered members of the crowd. She was conscious and talking, so I expect she survived whatever it was that got her temporarily laid up.

As I said, I didn’t hear all of Gephardt. But as near as I can tell, his speech came down to, “time flies, things change.” Here’s something that won’t change: this man will never be President of the United States. Never mind his politics. He just doesn’t have a presidential name. It was the same thing that sidetracked the late Paul Tsongas in 1992 in favor of Bill Clinton.