“Another sad day for Lake Michigan. Industry still using the lake as its own dumping grounds!” Jim Brown
A malfunction at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor plant has resulted in thousands of fish dying in the East Branch of the Little Calumet River and in nearby Lake Michigan. Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) officials have used the euphemism “exceedances” to characterize the chemical spill of cyanide and ammonia-nitrogen. Indiana Dunes National Park superintendent Paul Labovitz closed the Portage beach area and told Kevin Nevers of the Chesterton Tribune, “It was a broad-spectrum kill. It was not species-specific. Anything close to the source was killed. It even killed catfish, and catfish are pretty hard to kill.” Labovitz was rather cavalier in concluding, “I put this in the category of ‘Shit Happens in an industrial community.’” He praised Arcelor-Mittal for accepting blame for the environmental disaster and communicating results of their ongoing investigation far faster than was the case with U.S. Steel when a deadly carcinogen spilled into Burns Ditch from its Portage facility 30 months ago with dire consequences. Republicans being in control of state and federal regulatory commissions, it is doubtful that Arcelor-Mittal will receive more than a slap on the wrist.
Post-Tribune photo byZbigniew Bzdak
Cha Meyer reacted to Portage Beach being closed until further notice: “We are canaries in the coal mine of the world that our society has polluted and squandered away.”
George Takei at Rowher and at present
Rohwer Internment Camp
Veteran actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” series, is in AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy,” which takes place in an internment camp where Japanese-Americans were consigned during World War II. In a Timeinterview Takei tells of his family being interned when he was just five. Soldiers showed up at their home in Los Angeles and took them to Santa Anita racetrack, where a chain-link fence surrounded the entire facility. Takei recalled:
We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall. But to me, it was fun to sleep where the horses slept.
One stall had been home to the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, winner of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap less than two years before. From Santa Anita the Takei family was sent to Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, Arkansas. Takei recalled:
We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas. To me, it was an exotic, alien planet. Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to the barbed-wire fence. I remember catching pollywogs and putting them in a jar. Dragonflies, which I’ve never seen before. The first winter, it snowed. I was a Southern California kid. To wake up one morning and see everything covered in white, it was a magical place.
For my parents, it was a series of goading terrors, one after the other. But children are amazingly adaptable. We adjusted, and we got used to what would have been a grotesque thing – lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall, or going with my father to bathe in a mass shower. When I made the night runs to the latrine, searchlights followed me. I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. It wasn’t until later that I learned about the reality, the horror, the terror, and the injustice of the incarceration.
Toni and I attended a RailCats baseball contest against the Milwaukee Milkmen. While the game itself was rather boring, afterwards there was a spectacular fireworks display, like a grand finale that lasted a good 10-15 minutes. In“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” essayist Hanif Abdurraqib admitted to being a fan of his hometown Triple-A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers, and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display at Huntington Park:Over the weekend:
You’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while the fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets. I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh. How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.
Music critic Abdurraqib, it turns out, is a big Bruce Springsteen fan. He has attended several of The Boss’s concerts and is particularly fond of “The River” album, which celebrates the small pleasures of blue-collar culture and, as Abdurraqib put it, “the ability to make the most of your life, because it’s the only life you have.” Catching Bruce and the E Street Band at a sold-out show in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Abdurraqib observed:
As I looked around the swelling arena, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity. As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy. He was sitting on a step covered in sweat and rubbing his right ankle. A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.
In Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America. Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. In my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.
I woke up disoriented, then realized; no electricity. Most of Chesterton suffered the same fate. Dave took us to breakfast. After encountering long waits at Round the Clock and Bob Evans, we were about to settle for Culver’s when Dave noticed that, it being 11 o’clock, AJ’s Pizza Company was just opening. They served great coffee, and the lunch menu included a tasty steak sandwich and homemade chips. I called Ron Cohen on Dave’s cellphone, and, back at the condo, he and Nancy picked me up for Fred Chary’s 80th birthday celebration just as our power returned.
EllaRose
As always, Diane Chary prepared a bountiful buffet. Having recently eaten, I was pleased to discover a vegetable plate and chunks of mangoes in a salad. Later I went back for other delicacies. Fred’s daughter EllaRose, a playwright, came from New York City. Missing were regulars Karen Rake and Milan Andrejevich, as well as recently retired English professors Alan Barr and George Bodmer. Both attended ten years ago but not for Fred’s 75th, by which time they were shunning me – a case of letting academic differences take priority over friendship. Not surprisingly, right-winger Jean Poulard and lefty Jack Bloom, both still teaching despite being well past retirement age, argued over Trump separating immigrant families. Bloom is teaching a Fall course on the Vietnam War and is eager to see my old syllabus. Its reading list included Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ronald J. Glasser’s 365 Days,Michael Herr’s Dispatches,and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. I talked with Fred about the Phillies’ recent sweep of the Cubs and told him that the Steel ShavingsI gave him contained descriptions of the Eagles’ Superbowl victory and the raucous celebrations afterwards. EllaRose opened a bottle of champagne Poulard had brought from his home village in France, and we toasted the guest of honor and vowed to gather again five years hence. Diane insisted I take food home for Toni, so I opted for slices of vegetarian lasagna and chocolate cake. On the birthday cake were figurines depicting a Phillies pitcher and catcher and a Cubs batter striking out.
Like Fred, I am a loyal Philadelphia sports fan with a couple all-time favorite players in each major sport – Richie Ashburn and Dick Allen in baseball, Eagles Chuck Bednarick and Sonny Jorgensen, Flyers Bobby Clarke and Bernie “Kid” Parent, and 76ers Julius “Dr. J” Irving and Allen “AI” Iverson. Iverson is also a favorite of Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote an essay titled “It Rained on Ohio On the Night when Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” The memorable event took place in 1996, AI’s rookie season, when “he hadn’t yet grown out his soon-to-be signature cornrows and was several tattoos short of where he would end his career.” At the top of the key facing his idol, AI pulled off a double crossover, then nailed an easy jump shot. While in high school, Iverson had been incarcerated in the aftermath of an interracial bowling alley brawl in Hampton, Virginia (only black kids were arrested). Accused of throwing a chair, Iverson told the judge, “What kind of man would I be to hit a woman in the head with a damn chair?” Sent to a correctional farm, Iverson couldn’t play basketball his senior year and scholarship offers dried up. Only Georgetown’s coach John Thompson took a chance on him.
Beloved by 76er fans and self-described “punk kids” like Abdurraqib, Iverson gave his all on the court, “throwing his body all over the place for the city of Philadelphia and dragging lackluster teams to the playoffs and then [in 2002] to the finals.” The day after watching AI fake out Jordan, Abdurraqib was on a still-slick playground in Columbus “in baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender”dreaming “of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty.” Of Iverson Abdurraqib concluded:
He was a 6-foot wrecking ball, who wouldn’t practice hurt, but who would play hurt for what felt like half of the season. The era of witnessing Allen Iverson was the era of learning a language for your limits and how to push beyond them.
Ray Smock in Nebraska
Kat Turk; fossil from Ediacaran period found in Australia
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