'Running While Black'

Many white people, myself included, don't think about how something as simple as exercising has a racial component. This column originally ran on May 30, 2020.

A former restaurant on West State Street has seen some recent activity, with lights on and new plywood across the doors, fueling speculation that will reopen as an outlet shoe store or another restaurant.

In the last week or so, that plywood has either come loose or been moved to the side, leaving the building open with no cars or construction vehicles in the parking lot.

I often jog in the area, and it’s tempting to detour a few steps and poke my head inside. A looky-loo, that’s me.

I haven’t done it yet. It would be my luck to fall into some unseen hole, twist my ankle or maybe end up on security footage and be embarrassed.

The fear of being shot has never entered into my calculations. That’s an example of white privilege, writ large.

Ask a person who is brown or black why they might not peek into a vacant building and you may receive another reason — fear of interactions with other citizens and/or law enforcement that could escalate to the point of arrest or even death.

It happened to Ahmaud Arbery in February. The Georgia man had gone inside a house under construction along his regular jogging route. Later he was shot to death after three men confronted him and attempted to make a citizen’s arrest, which Arbery resisted.

And if you’re saying, well, he shouldn’t have resisted, ask yourself what you would do if three strangers attempted to take you into “custody” when you were out for a jog or a walk. Under what authority do they have that right? Where are they taking you? Who will know you are gone?

What these three fine, upstanding paragons of justice and virtue could have done, if they felt they had to do anything at all because they were convinced Arbery was a nefarious thief, was to follow him from a safe distance, note his address, and phone the police with their suspicions.

Instead, they were so assured their cause was righteous and so secure in their white privilege that they filmed their interaction and almost got away with a “resisting arrest’ narrative before national and international outrage over the footage, released months later by one of the assailants, forced or shamed authorities into taking another look.

The New York Times did a follow up examining the phenomenon of “running while black,” talking with runners of color who contend with the reality of misunderstandings and suspicion every time they lace up their shoes.

Me, I just stretch a little and run. Again, white privilege.

We see the excruciating reality of racial disparities again and again, but often only when it is being recorded by a private citizen. Take the incident in New York City’s Central Park, where a person of color asked Amy Cooper, who is white, to leash her dog. She threatened to call the police and say, “There’s an African-American man threatening my life.” (Many commentators appeared more concerned that she was choking her pet during the exchange, recorded by the man, than that she was conniving to use race to get authorities to come running.)

Or, far more tragically, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this week after an officer kneeled on his throat while three others stood watching. Floyd said “I can’t breathe” twelve times. All four officers were fired, but a man lost his life, all over an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill.

Zeba Blay, writing about the Amy Cooper incident for the Huffington Post, notes there is “a level of self-examination and self-awareness that white people are not doing that they must do. There’s something that white people, even the ones who believe that they hold no biases, that they wield no power, must admit to themselves and begin to unpack. They are complicit — and even participatory — in the system of white supremacy. Individual white people may not believe they are, but their ability to tap into that system is always within reach.”

Conclusions like these are hard for Euro-Americans to swallow, similar to how hard it is to accept being labeled “Euro-American” and live with a hyphenated existence that acknowledges whiteness is not the default setting in this nation.

If that hyphen rankles, maybe that’s a starting point: a realization that every day one can spend without considering race is a luxury that more than a quarter of this nation does not have.

This reality affects everything — from important considerations about where people live and work and how they interact with neighbors, to more mundane things, like satisfying their curiosity with a quick peek at a building under construction.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Fox eyes the skies in latest audience bid

Fox Weather is low-hanging fruit, isn’t it?

Within moments of a New York Times story announcing Rupert Murdoch’s new streaming channel, social media unloaded with a tsunami of commentary.

In one tweet, a hypothetical Fox meteorologist tells the audience it’s sunny and perfect in Miami. Meanwhile, a tropical storm batters the city.

In another, a writer predicts Fox Weather will blame climate change on undocumented people at the border. (The channel will refer to them as “illegals,” of course.)

A third tweet speculates on how Tucker Carlson might comment on a tornado, by noting that they disproportionately strike areas where white people live. Carlson blames George Soros.

Another wit wonders if Fox Weather will offer hourly updates from “the former guy,” armed with a Sharpie, too close to the reality of 45’s explanation of Hurricane Dorian from 2019 to be funny.

My own imagination went to the nascent channel’s possible coverage of any protest outside the National Weather Service headquarters in Silver Springs, Maryland. There, a mob contradicts the reality of climate change and seeks to overthrow the meteorologists in charge.

Despite the presence of a noose on the lawn, by the next day the Fox

Weather team dubs the rioters “peaceful protestors” and “tourists.”

The jokes illustrate a few things. For one, they indicate why Mad magazine stopped creating new material a few years back. When topical humor can be shared seconds after an announcement or event, publishing similar schtick months later is pointless. (SNL has the same problem.)

On a deeper level, jokes about the new weather channel acknowledge how deeply Fox News has exploited its audience. For regular viewers, and especially those who watch Fox to the exclusion of everything else, the world is strikingly different from what the rest of Americans see.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote earlier this week about the Republican Party’s embrace of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and their “narrative in which Democrats were dangerous socialists, out to destroy home and family.” Cox notes that the network’s commentators have “skewed reality” for their audiences.

Certainly many Americans have strained relationships with parents, grandparents and lifelong friends due in large part to the broadcast crack-cocaine of various Fox personalities, who are profiteers in exploiting division.

The gulf between Fox viewers’ “consensus reality” and objective reality is perhaps best exemplified by a Reuters/Ipsos poll from mid-May. It found 53 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the November election, despite zero evidence of widespread voter fraud. Only 3 percent of Democrats believe Trump won, and only 25 percent of all Americans. (That last is almost as concerning as the Republican number.)

Ironically, having whetted the appetites of a portion of the public for zany conspiracies, Fox News now finds itself on the outs with some viewers who don’t find the channel crazy enough. Hence, the rise of One America News Network, aka Fox without even a small shred of decency. Maybe this explains Fox’s decision to expand into weather.

Whatever Fox Weather’s intentions are – other than making gobs of money for Rupert Murdoch – viewers cannot afford to delude themselves on climate change the way they have on the pandemic and the election.

Encouragingly, at least for now, a majority of Republicans and like-minded independents (59 percent), in a Pew Research survey, believe human activity causes climate change (compared to 91 percent of Democrats).

The overwhelming consensus among scientists and researchers is that climate change is real and the world is rapidly running out of time to address it. America needs to be a leader in this cause, reversing the disastrous environmental policies of 2016-2020 and guiding the world away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable energy.

But if Fox Weather follows the trend of Fox News, look for junk climatology theories to receive more exposure, green-friendly policies to be criticized, and a new wave of anti-regulation candidates to flood the ballots.

In other words, a punchline for our children and grandchildren, who will find climate change is no laughing matter.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Do (vacation) clothes really make the man?

My twenty-year retrospective continues with this (lightly revised) column from June 3, 2004. Honestly, nothing about my vacation prep has changed. I still hate to buy new clothes to see people I will never see again, and my wife still insists on it. 

I can tell it's almost vacation time because my wife has become very concerned with my wardrobe.

Apparently, my clothes are just fine 51 weeks of the year, when I come into contact with people I know and respect. But they are totally inappropriate for an 800-mile trek to the beach, where I will interact with complete strangers whom I will never see again. 

To hear my wife tell it, these people will return to Boise or Cheyenne with nothing better to tell than the story of some slob from Ohio with bleach stains on his shirt. 

My usual attire during the 51 weeks when I'm permitted to dress myself is jeans and a T-shirt. Most of the T-shirts are promotions from Mount Union Theatre, with Spider-Man, Star Wars and other movie logos on the back. They're comfortable and durable. 

In spring and early summer, I shift into denim shorts. Admittedly, they have seen better days. But the holes they have are strategically placed and don't reveal too much, as long as I keep my shirt untucked. 

Perfectly good beach attire, and isn't that the point: To be comfortable? 

No, says my wife. The point is to be presentable, whatever that means. It's a variation on the old riff where Mom tells Junior to be sure to wear clean underwear when leaving the house, in case he is in a traffic accident. As though the only place he will leave skid marks in an accident is on the road. 

I'm an old hand at this "old dog, new clothes," schtick. In my callow newlywed days, before I had been trained by years of good-natured (I hope) browbeating, I put up quite a fight whenever we came within 30 yards of a clothing store. But now I go quietly, like a medicated prisoner making that last walk to the gallows. 

She is impressed by how docile I am. I pick a few shorts and shirts off the racks at random, favoring neutral colors. (If off-white and beige can sell a house, they should sell her too, right?)

She shakes her head and dubs my selections "old man clothes," offending all the old men nearby who think they are pretty natty. 

I wish I understood what she means by "old." They're just shorts and shirts; they don't scream AARP or have a Ben-Gay logo stitched into the label. 

I resist the urge to say that trips with her to the clothing store are making me old before my time. They are, in fact, aging me in dog years. I allow her to take my hand and lead me to the trendy section, just a few aisles over from the geriatrics. 

"Look at him," she says, pointing to a mannequin. It's dressed in cargo shorts (I know this because they're labeled), a white T-shirt and an unbuttoned checkered shirt. 

To me, Mr. Mannequin looks like a slob. Nevertheless, she stares up at him — how quick we are to assign genders to inanimate objects! — as if he were a man of letters, probably multi-lingual with a smattering of psychology and Shakespeare and able to whip up a mean martini. 

Moments later, I'm in the dressing room, trying to live up to the mannequin's plastic perfection. The labels in these clothes are "Urban Up." Very trendy. 

"You look wonderful," she says as I pirouette outside the dressing room. I'm not sure if she's addressing me or the mannequin. 

I don't feel wonderful. The only things I'm missing are a backward ball cap and a half dozen body piercings. I'm about to regress to newlywed mode, when I fought for the wardrobe. 

Until I remember that I'll only be wearing these clothes 800 miles away from home, for those good people vacationing at the beach from Cheyenne or Boise. After that, the purchase goes down like a vintage bottle of Merlot. 

At home, I can return to my slovenly self, a walking billboard for movies and swiss-cheese denim cutoffs. On the beach only will I transform into Rico Suave, an aging stud muffin still trying to emulate Don Johnson. 

Yo yo yo. The vacationer's in the house. 

Rawhide Kid (1985) 1-4

Marvel's Rawhide Kid mini-series from 1985 is buried in multiple layers of nostalgia. There's the nostalgia the reader feels today, looking back on the Marvel of the mid-1980s. There's the nostalgia for the bygone days of Marvel's Western comics, when characters like the Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid were published regularly. Then there's the nostalgia felt by the Rawhide Kid himself, an older character in this mini-series, for his youth, when he could "roam the country freely, riding four weeks without seeing another human face, let alone having to circumnavigate a fence."

Writer Bill Mantlo, one of Marvel's busiest scribes in the 1980s, does a good job balancing modernism with the Old West of so much dime-novel and Hollywood myth-making. The Rawhide Kid in Mantlo's script is both a beneficiary and a victim of this myth-making, being the star of a series of magazine adventures that exaggerate his prowess and burnish his legend. The stories are a source of income, but they also lead to gunfights in every city he visits when young turks anxious to make names for themselves attempt to outdraw him. (It's never explained why Rawhide — "Don't call me Kid! Ah'm old enough t'be yore daddy!" — doesn't just change his clothes and go by a different name.)

Fans of the original Rawhide Kid stories will find much to appreciate here. He still shoots the guns out of his opponents' hands, rides backwards on his trusty steed, Nightwind, and swings off buildings like a trained acrobat. While he complains occasionally about his age and arthritis, neither condition keeps him from outdrawing and outfighting his enemies. Each issue is mostly self-contained. Young Jeff Packard, Rawhide's "understudy" who is on the run from Pinkerton agents, does provide an overarching subplot from month to month. 

The most successful issue is the first, illustrated by Herb Trimpe and John Severin, and colored by Marie Severin. Not surprisingly given the Severins' presence, it evokes classic comic-book Westerns of the past. The first issues also gives readers a quick recap of the Kid's "origin," where the young character seeks revenge for the death of his Uncle Ben (shades of Spider-Man!). 

Trimpe pencils the remaining three issues, inked and embellished by various hands — Gerry Talaoc on issues two and three, Dan Bulandi on the fourth. It's all easy on the eyes and clearly delineated, although it's hard to see any of Trimpe's style throughout; the inkers and finishers really overpower the pencils. 

At various points, Mantlo addresses social concerns outside the realm of Marvel's earlier  Westerns. In the second issue, Rawhide demonstrates empathy for the plight of Native Americans: "Grey Bear and his people didn't have no real way o' defendin' themselves against the white folks who flooded over their lands an' swept their way o' life away!" The third issue features an African-American bounty hunter and the Ku Klux Klan, although they are never called by that name. It's a welcome concession to the larger realities of the nineteenth century that are too often glossed over in the genre. 

That last issue is where a mostly pleasant series goes off the rails, as Rawhide spends too much of the story having nightmares about his own death and fighting under a cloud of hallucinations, fancying that he faces many of his previous enemies. It feels a lot like those Marvel anniversary issues of old, such as The Incredible Hulk #200, where the title character faces phantom versions of all his foes while traipsing around at microscopic size in somebody else's brain. And I was disappointed that the Terrible Totem didn't put in an appearance. As one of Rawhide's strangest foes, he definitely deserved a shout-out. 

I'm not sure what to make of the ending. Has the aged Rawhide outgrown his legend? Embraced it? Does he ride off to further adventures? Or to a life of peace? He does show up fifteen years later in two fantastic mini-series written by John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco, but is that the same Rawhide we see here? 

Regardless, the final issue is the one misfire — get it? — of an otherwise enjoyable series of adventures with one of Marvel's earliest characters. I don't believe these four issues have ever been collected, but I can't believe the originals would be hard to come by or very expensive.

Face front!

This column was first published in May 2008.

Sometimes, the wood grain on my bathroom cupboard looks like a vulture in profile.

Other times, it looks like a creature from “The Dark Crystal,” an old movie by Muppet master Jim Henson. But when I blink, it goes back to being wood grain.

Humans have a tendency to recognize images, especially faces, in inanimate objects. The scientific term for this is pareidolia, a word so obscure my spell checker spits it out like rotten meat.

We practice pareidolia from infancy because life rewards it. The first time we smile up at our parents, recognizing them as separate and distinct from the swirls of light and color around them, we receive positive reinforcement in the form of hugs and kisses. This tells us it’s good to know people. Recognizing faces becomes so ingrained that we keep seeing them wherever we look.

Taking this to the next level, psychologists speculate that designers unwittingly copy the human face when they create. Call it ego, going with what you know, or an extension of all those koochie koos they received as babies.

Check out a three-slotted electric wall socket – two eyes and a nose. Some sockets have additional red and black reset buttons underneath – a mouth and a moustache.

How about the front of an automobile? Two headlights (eyes) and a grill (a smile, albeit one with braces). Many houses, with front doors flanked by two windows, appear vaguely human. (Kids draw them this way all the time.)

The masons who worked on Glamorgan Castle dropped a few faces into the stonework around the building. These aren’t technically gargoyles, which are connected to spouts to throw rainwater away from a building. In gothic terms, Glamorgan Castle hosts “grotesques,” fantastic faces and forms with no utilitarian purpose. Of course, I could be imagining faces where none exist. (You have to get out of your car and walk around the building to see – or not see – them.)

Our penchant for face finding isn’t limited to manmade objects. We spot faces in clouds, ashes, mountains and fields. Remember the photo of a devilish visage in the smoke above the Twin Towers? While Photoshop tricks and religious indoctrination helped the illusion, it also illustrates the power of pareidolia.

The sight of the man in the moon is another example, although only dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy freaks believe it is there by design. Photos of Mars by the Viking Orbiter show what appears to be a face – some say Jesus – etched into the red planet. Again, it says more about us and our face-recognition software – i.e. our eyes and brain – then it does any welcome mat put out by God or little green people. Look at the same images with better resolution and different contrast and you can’t discern a face at all.

An entire website – inanimatefaces.com – is devoted to photos of faces in unlikely places: chairs, boxes, telephones and book bags. The shortcut language of e-mails and text messages depends on pareidolia. Otherwise, how would we know people are happy, sad or surprised when they type :), :( and :0.

Some enterprising souls turn a profit from pareidolia. The faces of the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, John Lennon and Elvis spotted on cookies, grilled cheese sandwiches, greasy napkins and boogered-up Kleenex tissues fetch far more than they’re worth on eBay. Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said that if you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back?

Maybe I should put my section of bathroom cupboard for sale on the Internet. Surely, a Muppet fan somewhere is willing to pay top dollar.

Adventures in Personal Hygiene

This column originally ran in October 2008. I remembered nothing about it before I opened the document a few minutes ago. It was probably too emotionally scarring, so I pushed it deep down into my memory.

Picture the hypothetical man pushing a cart alone through the grocery store, list in hand. Dozens of items are on it, including body wash, lunch meat, cheese slices, and feminine-hygiene products.

Wait a minute! Feminine-hygiene products? Is he nuts?

Our hero had a moment of doubt when his wife added them to the list, but he quickly squelched it. After all, he’s a 40-year-old man, not some callow kid whose voice goes up three octaves when he asks the pharmacist for a pack of prophylactics. “Grow up,” he said to himself, “you can do it.”

But this was at home, when the prospect of wheeling the cart past the toothpaste and mouthwash and into That Aisle was a half-hour away. Anything a half-hour away is an eternity to a man, hardly worth mentioning until it is much closer.

And now it’s much closer.

Our hero wipes his sweaty palms on his shirt. He cruises past the display, casually looking in its direction, spotting the light-blue box with the yellow banner, the same style colors he has seen for years in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cupboard, the drawer that may as well be marked with a skull and crossbones and the word “poison.”

He almost makes his move, but people are all about. A mother with her children, an old man with a cane, a couple ornery kids doing God knows what with the liquid soap, all too close for him to grab the product.

“It’s a natural part of life,” he hears his wife whisper, like the phantom voice of Obi Wan Kenobi telling Luke to use the Force. “Yeah, what’s the big deal, Dad?” his daughter wants to know. Another disembodied spirit heard from.

He makes a second pass. Mom and kids are gone, the old man has tottered off, and the Lever brothers have slithered away. The coast is clear. He looks down into his empty cart – why, oh why, didn’t he pick up some other items first, so he could hide the “no big deal” products beneath!

His hand shoots out. Bam! One box goes into the cart. Bam! A second box is almost ready to join its partner – when a customer turns the corner.

Don’t ask if the customer is male or female, young or old, singular or plural. Blood rushes to his cheeks, his face goes four shades of red and he feels as if he might faint. The only thing that keeps him upright is the potential embarrassment that would accompany passing out in That Aisle.

Meanwhile, he still has a stranglehold on the second box, which hangs precipitously over the cart. One involuntary muscle spasm later, it drops – plop! – into the chasm. Picture the Coyote slinking off after a trap to catch the Road Runner has blown up in his face and you’ll know how the man exits the vicinity.

The worst is surely over, our hero believes. All he has to do is get the other items on the list, use them to cover the two “no big deals,” and get the heck out of Dodge. But then he sees a former student, one who has likely noticed that his teacher is escorting two boxes of Kotex through the store in an otherwise empty cart. Making small talk while driving a shopping buggy at 55 mph is an art, but our hero masters it.

He runs into two more students, but not before he’s boxed in his special selections with cat litter, a head of lettuce and a can of Pledge.

All that remains is the minor indignity of the conveyor belt and the checkout line. Mercifully absent is anybody he knows. In the car on the way home, he sighs in relief. This has certainly been a character-building experience, an expression people use for any job they aren’t man enough to do themselves.

Would our hero do it again? Certainly he would. Hypothetically, of course.

A crappy story

This column originally ran in October, 2012. 

Less than two weeks before Halloween, and I was facing my fear of heights to fish a bag of poop off the neighbor’s roof.

I wish I could say I was a Good Samaritan, that the nice couple next door had reached out in need because hooligans had taken the “trick” part of “trick or treat” to heart.

But I can’t, because I threw the poop up there myself.

Before I go further, let me explain that I’m not the world’s best neighbor. Living next to Chris Schillig doesn’t exactly guarantee property values will drop, but it is a sign that you should contact a real estate agent soon.

You know the neighbor who obsesses over his lawn and shrubs, trimming and pruning to surgical precision, using a leaf blower the way a holy man might wield a crucifix, covering porch railings and mailbox with fresh coats of paint every spring whether they need it or not?

Well, I’m not that neighbor.

My sole goal for mowing is to set a new PR each time I pull the cord. My idea of weeding is to run that same mower through the flower beds, as long as it doesn’t detract from my overall time. I consider Mother Nature to be the best leaf blower, especially when she shuffles fall’s foliage out of my yard and into somebody else’s. The one time I tried my hand with a paintbrush, I stopped mid stroke and hired somebody else-- the cheapest somebody else I could find -- to finish the job.

In other words, I’m less Ward Cleaver and more Homer Simpson.

But I do have standards, lax though they may be -- weeds in the crack of the hypothetical sidewalk that even I refuse to cross. And tossing feces on the neighbor’s roof definitely is on the wrong side of that line.

Not that I intentionally threw the poop there, of course.

See, while I am in other regards a neighbor to be avoided, if not outright abhorred, in one regard I am the picture of fastidiousness: cleaning up after my dog.

Whenever I walk him, I take an ample supply of doggie bags, and not the kind they give you in restaurants. Wherever and whenever my pooch squats, I am there, usually with plastic Walmart sack in hand, plucking every last trace of steaming doggie DNA from the frosty autumn grass.

The problem is that I fancy myself a major-league pitcher. When I return home, I stand at the end of the driveway, between my neighbor’s house and mine, and hurl the bag of poop toward my detached garage, aiming for the garbage can.

Usually, I miss the target. Bags often carom off the backyard fence, the side of the house and my wife’s car.

But on one memorable Thursday night, the dog jerked his leash as I went into the windup, and the bag did not shoot down the drive toward friendly-fire targets, but rather up, up, up into the air and splat! onto the neighbor’s roof.

It was awfully dark that night, so inky black that I wasn’t certain where the bag had landed. But I hadn’t thrown it high enough to escape the atmosphere and enter orbit, and it hadn’t come back down, so I suspected the worst.

(Actually, the worst would have been through their living room window and into their laps as they watched TV, but still …)

For one moment, I considered slinking inside the house and pretending like I hadn’t violated a social norm bigger than Antarctica.

And actually, that’s just what I did.

But then my conscience kicked in, and I knew I would have to confess.

So that’s how, one day later, I ended up balanced precariously on a ladder, using a broomstick to bridge the gap between the top of the highest rung and the offensive bag of feces.

It was a growth experience in many ways. Halloween should be all about facing your fears -- whether a fear of social embarrassment or a fear of heights.

For me, the first was much worse than the second. Not only did I have to confess to my neighbor that I’d thrown a steaming bag of crap on his roof, but because I’m the kind of neighbor who isn’t the least bit handy, I also had to borrow his ladder to get it down.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com @cschillig on Twitter