Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
The holiday decorations in Logan Square are mostly in the modest working-class range – older ornaments, probably dating back to the time when the current owners bought the house, lovingly tended and kept over year upon year. In all of this part of town, there are only one or two colossal see-it-from-orbit yard displays – the kind that would melt snow, if we had snow – and hardly anything that says hipster/artist .
This is the exception: a long, narrow window – a simple black casement – with a hanging of three green plastic saucer sleds, each individually spray-painted with the word HO and adorned with a string of lights.
Speaking honestly, that’s the sort of display I myself would create – something funny, novel, a bit ironic. But the ones I like to look at tend to be like this sweet little snowman, eight inches high, hanging out on a modest fence a block away. This is the one that tells me welcome; goodwill and best wishes; the peace of the season to you.
Tonight these ladies are standing outside one of the tiny clothing stores on Milwaukee Avenue here in my neighborhood, Logan Square. (Yes, still no measurable snow.) Every day when the weather is clear, these mannequins live outside, enticing the world with their offers of “ten colours 5.99.”
Logan Square still has quite a few businesses like this – small family-owned shops offering modestly priced products to shoppers who live in the neighborhood. People don’t travel here from miles around to take advantage of a vast, elegant selection. They walk here from nearby, or take the bus – yes, the bus – to spend a few careful dollars eked out from a tight budget on inexpensive, practical stuff. Milwaukee Avenue, by Diversey, is lined with tiny shops each of which offers one type of thing to this target audience – clothing, shoes, bright flouncy nylon curtains, a bit of tired produce, some low-cost alcohol.
Yes, these businesses are relics of another time and yes, they are slowly being replaced by shops catering to a different class of shoppers, with plenty of disposable income.
But when the new world has moved in and tastefully eradicated all these down-market storefronts, won’t you miss views like this?
“Are you ready for the holidays?”
a. Do I look ready?
b. Maybe my holidays are already over.
c. Holidays? What holidays?
Last night I went by the Loop Station Post Office, where we get our mail, and saw that the Calder Flamingo was illuminated (it’s not always that way at night – honestly, I think when it comes to turning on the lights, sometimes they just forget). As I am always saying, this is one of my favorite places in the world. And last night the setting was especially fine – with people contentedly streaming home, holiday decorations glittering, the air moving gently. It was a lovely night to be in the Loop.
This photo was dumb luck. The sleek reflective surface isn’t the pavement of Federal Plaza – I had steadied the camera on top of one of the marble-topped counters inside the post office, a practical spot where people take care of the things that are little but important, like stamping an envelope or opening a bill. (The counter is original to the building and was also designed by Mies.) At first, I felt the reflection made Flamingo more toylike (awww, look how cute!), but that feeling was quickly replaced by another: a sense that this monument was sentient – a powerful creature browsing in the night, watching the nighttime traffic with a bemused air.
Here’s another thing about this picture: no snow. Here in Chicago we have now gone 289 days without measurable snow. That is a historical record. Today, the meteorologists are claiming we will have snow tomorrow, and a lot of it. Well, maybe we will, who knows? The atmosphere has that bleached, austere quality that used to seem like a forerunner of snowfall, and the sun is a faint lightbulb behind a curtain. Maybe the next time I see Flamingo, it will have snow around its feet.
Tonight we are not as sad, but we are angrier – a cold anger, edged with disgust and shame. Americans are 5% of the people on earth, and we own 50% of the guns on earth. And this is not part of our great historic tradition, either, sorry, NRA liars. More and scarier guns are concentrating in ever fewer hands. Ever more often, they are used in vicious rampages – this year alone, 16 mass murder “events” in the US. Sixteen. Events. We have accepted all of this, again and again – we are willing to hand over so many lives, so many times, and turn our backs on the social contract, in order to not have to do anything.
Haggling – that’ s what it is. You can bully us. You can have your killer toys. And maybe a teeny bit of regulation. Just let me get back to my quiet time with this episode of 30 Rock. We have already shown the price we are willing to pay, over and over.
And so for tonight, I am angry, and I am also ashamed.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
I didn’t sleep well the last two nights, thinking of this latest – whatever it is. Mass murder. NRA festival. Crime against humanity.
We are all roots of the same tree, surviving – or rotting – together. We are all tangled in this together.
A cruel and vicious thing happens, something monstrous, something that radiates horror and pain, and people tell me nothing could have been done about its root cause. Nor can anything be done. They marshal a host of arguments – one involved the “ghetto” and “teachers are raping our children,” another involved a spork, a third just said it’s our culture. It’s our way of life.
The philosopher Parmenides thought change was impossible. Life at any given moment must be identical to the moment immediately before, because there was no intervening moment in which anything could have altered. Ex hypothesi, change cannot happen.
Is that the case for us? Because it seems to me there was a time when this was not our culture. Once upon a time, not that long ago, mass firearms murders were not an everyday part of the American lifestyle.
We are now back from yet another road trip that has hauled us back and forth across nearly 2,500 miles of Midwest over two weekends. We got all sorts of weather during our travels – glorious sunshine, pouring rain, mean little sleet, patchy fog. Here is the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, late Friday night, seen from Fort street and shrouded in cold fog.
This visit to Detroit made me sadder than I expected. The state legislature had just blitzkrieged through the surprise “right to work for less money” bill in the lame duck session and is now rushing though several other ugly laws, among them anti-women’s health care measures and even an anti-sharia law.
Driving around Detroit at night has become an unusual experience, simply because across so much of the city, the street lights are no longer turned on after dark. They are just ornaments of another time, when the city gathered together people for art and commerce, and provided services in the collective interest. This weekend, nearly every residential neighborhood we drove through was dark, except for lights shining from private homes. The glittering city, the social contract– that’s not Detroit. Much of it is as dark as North Korea. This is a new thing – I don’t remember it from even a few months ago.
When I began writing here, I swore I would not do ruins porn. But on this visit I acutely felt how Michigan has been the vanguard for the dismantling of the United States – the place where the early experiments in destroying our way of life took place, and are ongoing, and have been so very successful.
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