I've been lucky enough, when "the news" has touched my life at all, to be on this side of it, the side that gets to tell the story. And, somehow, because I always felt like I was at least trying to be fair and accurate, I never truly understood where the popular conception that we in the dreaded MainStreamMedia can't be trusted to get things right.
But in reading and seeing the coverage of Senator Obama's trip to Africa, I increasingly have the sense we, collectively, come up short in telling some of the most important truths.
I was heartbroken and frustrated to read yesterday's dispatch from Kenya. (Lynn Sweet's story in the Sun-Times was headlined, "An eager welcome in a notorious slum.")
When you know a place and, more importantly, when you know people there, it is never just a "notorious slum." This is, I suspect, as true for East Africa as for the West Side of Chicago or the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
So, when reports describe the "ragged canvas tents and shacks covered with corrugated roofs," it bothers me that they don't note the often incredibly fastidious interiors of those dwellings, which often feature beautiful carved wood furniture and lace tablecloths.
Yes, there is garbage and sewage in the streets and, yes, the smell can be intolerable, especially on a hot day. But people's homes and clothes are generally strikingly clean.
And, no, there isn't much in the way of a formal economy or regular commerce, but, in the complete absence of regular employers and industry, many of the people of Kibera have carved out incredibly entrepreneurial ways to support themselves.
Through my volunteer work with Global Alliance for Africa, I've come to know two amazing women, Jackie and Josephine, who have organized a women's co-operative in Kibera that is helping dozens of these micro-enterprises grow.
I don't claim any deep knowledge of The Truth About Africa or any such thing. At the end of the day, I'm just a very fortunate white woman in Chicago who has had the chance to travel to these places a few times and do a very small amount of work there. But, even with the little I know, I understand that there is so much more to the place than the hopeless poverty/sick children snapshots that make the news from time to time.
As a "notorious slum," Kibera sounds like a hopeless place. But as Jackie and Josephine's neighborhood, it is humbling and inspiring and the location of something that, on a good day, might be called optimism.
We have a name: Gilbert for a boy or Gillian for a girl.
Actually, a name might not be enough. We might actually have to give our firstborn child to Gillware, the data recovery specialists in Madison, WI who rescued EVERYTHING off my damaged hard drive.
(Special note to Erin: I know sarcasm is not always easy to catch in written form, so, yes, I am SERIOUSLY comparing my broken computer to the priceless life of a child. Because that is the kind of person I am.)
R. seems to believe that just paying them the $700 (!) is enough, but, really, can something like this be rewarded in mere currency? We're talking about karma here.
And, while he says he wasn't in it for the glory, exactly, he did have certain ideas about redeeming himself, most of which have not really worked out.
I've called his cell phone multiple times to arrange our lunch meeting. Each time, he's called me back from a different land line. Most of them have had different area codes. He says he's "between homes" right now, mostly staying with friends around the country, living off a Social Security check he collects under a different name.
Two days before we're supposed to meet, he tells me what time.
One day before we're supposed to meet, he tells me the place will be "on the South Side."
A few hours before we're supposed to meet, he picks the restaurant: Fox's Pizza in Orland Park.
Maintains secret identity
Meeting Cooley, the former mob lawyer whose testimony in the "Operation Gambat" federal corruption probe of the 1990s resulted in more than 30 convictions, has something of a Spy-vs-Spy feeling to it. Though Cooley has declined to participate in the formal federal witness protection program, he does receive some assistance from the government in maintaining a new -- theoretically secret -- identity.
So I settle into a booth near the bar and try to look casual as I wait for him to arrive. I've seen 10-year-old photos of him and have a general idea of what he looks like, and somehow I've convinced myself that I'll be able to spot him when he arrives. When the first slightly edgy-looking middle-age Irish-looking guy settles in alone at the bar, I realize this is a complete delusion.
By the time the third similar-looking guy arrives, I realize that I've been staring at them all so intently that I must appear to have a real thing for pale-faced goodfellas. And it dawns on me that Cooley is only partly committed to lying low. Real anonymity is just not in his nature.
Cooley, of course, shows up at exactly this moment. Keeping his baseball cap and sunglasses on indoors, he is immediately the most conspicuous person in the room. If there is, as has been claimed, a million-dollar bounty on his head, sharing a pizza with him in these circumstances is not the brightest thing I've ever done.
Nor, indeed, does Cooley seem to be particularly adept at flying under the radar. As he sits down, he's talking a mile a minute about the lawsuit that is currently hindering his ability to sell the TV and movie rights to his true crime memoir, When Corruption Was King (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 384 pages, $26.)
A former associate who Cooley says in his 2004 book raped a young woman and then paid her hush money is suing for libel.
'I'm not making this up'
I'm interested in what makes a guy like Cooley tick, how the son of a hardworking and resolutely honest Irish-Catholic South Side cop grows up to be a "fixer" for the Chicago Outfit, handing out bribes to keep wise guys out of jail. And I want to know what made him give it all up. And if it has been worth it.
But Cooley has other ideas. He wants to talk about Ed Vrdolyak and Donald Stephens and how he told the feds about the Hired Truck Program years ago but couldn't get anyone to do anything about it. He wants to explain the links he sees between the modern Hispanic Democratic Organization and the 1st Ward Machine of the old days.
"I'm not making this up," he insists repeatedly, as I take it all in, knowing that it is largely unprovable and, therefore, unprintable.
Things are different now than they were in those pre-Greylord, pre-Silver Shovel days, he says, but not entirely.
"When I first came in," he says, describing the moment he walked into the offices of the Organized Crime Strike Force and offered to become a cooperating witness, "my only goal was to clean up the court system. In New York, they had a few corrupt cops, a few corrupt judges. But in Chicago, it was the whole system. In Chicago, we owned it."
Now, he says, the Outfit has been effectively neutralized -- "They don't kill people. They don't collect a street tax." -- and the court system is far cleaner.
These are the great accomplishments of Cooley's life. In achieving them, he has lost his livelihood -- his license to practice law was taken away as a result of the numerous shady dealings he confessed to in his testimony -- and his identity and many of his friends.
Once a womanizer with a luxe lifestyle, he has become something of a loner, counting on a few close friends for financial support and a spare bed.
I ask him if it was worth it. He says yes, then seems to change his mind.
I ask him if he'd do it again. He says no.
Bob Cooley thought he'd be a hero -- the guy who brought down the mob. But instead, he came to be seen as a rat, the kind of minor player worth maybe a single episode on "The Sopranos."
Even the U.S. attorneys and federal agents involved in Gambat (an abbreviated reference to attorney Cooley's gambling habits) seemed to find him distasteful, going out of their way to distance themselves from his role in securing the Gambat convictions. His father, James Cooley, was lost to Alzheimer's before he could ever know that his wild and rebellious son had finally done the right thing and gone straight.
'They won't kill me'
No one thanked him. He has largely been forgotten.
And this is probably the thing that gets at him most.
"People confuse my convictions," he says, referring to the cases that turned on his testimony against former clients and associates, "with [the Operation] Greylord" corruption investigation.
He tells me he's thinking of coming back. Living here in the Chicago area and just seeing what happens.
"They won't kill me," he says, with a certain amount of bravado. "What would be the point?"
Friday's column: Resisting the pull of fabulous baby furniture
The single greatest thing my husband did when we were getting married was to leave the country for several weeks. There really wasn't a huge amount of work involved in organizing our simple 60-person wedding, or even in combining our two single households into one, but the few tasks that did exist were made infinitely simpler by the fact that only one of us was making the decisions.
I did, of course, consult with him on the important stuff, and saved all the receipts on purchases made with our joint credit card. But not the itemized receipts. Please.
And, to this day, I believe our marriage has gotten off to a very healthy start due in no small part to the fact that he does not know how much "we" paid for the cool-looking stainless steel trash can in our kitchen or the high-design recycling bin that goes with it.
Lately, I find myself feeling a little wistful for those last, heady days of independence. Because it's time for us to start buying baby stuff. And, apparently, we are going to have to do this together.
Baby minimalism is very chic
I fancy myself a hip, postmodern mother-to-be. So I'm not getting wrapped up in the marketing-driven hysteria that says there are approximately 7,000 "must have" items for a newborn child's nursery.
My role model in this is my best friend, who, when shopping for her newborn daughter, routinely dismissed certain items as "infantilizing" or "childish." Having a child, she declared, was no reason to throw good taste out the window -- Disney characters simply don't belong on clothes or furniture -- or to start accumulating tons and tons of sparkly plastic junk.
All that notwithstanding, though, there are certain, completely irrational and utterly materialistic "needs" that I'm stuck on. Like buying a beautiful hardwood crib with a matching dresser.
Yes, I know that all the cribs sold in stores meet government safety standards. And that a baby is unlikely to have a strong opinion about room decor. And that a perfectly good used dresser could be bought cheaply and refinished to (almost) match a new crib, saving us hundreds of dollars. But none of that makes any difference to me.
Attempts to discuss this topic generally follow a predictable pattern.
HUSBAND: [Logical point #1]
ME: True.
HUSBAND: [Logical point #2]
ME: Yes, I can see that.
HUSBAND: [Logical point #3]
ME: Right. Absolutely.
HUSBAND: [Logical conclusion, drawn from points 1 - 3]
ME: Hmm, yeah. But I still want the pretty one at the expensive furniture place.
Economics 101
While I don't have a lot of logic to draw upon, I do have several key arguments on my side. First, there's the whole "bearing your child" thing, which does give me a certain moral authority on baby-related topics. Still, I try not to play the pregnancy card too much. It's demeaning.
Instead, I've tried to make an economic case for the fancy crib/dresser purchase. This is always a dangerous tactic when you are an English major married to an MBA, but I find that, sometimes, if I talk fast and throw in enough terms like "sunk cost" and "demand curve," I can make it work. With the baby furniture thing, I begin with the assumption (because, in my experience, the difference between a slightly shaky economic theory and a Nobel Prize is pretty much just the boldness of the assumptions) that we are going to have multiple children. Then, I extend the cost of the furniture over a very long "useful life" and it turns out that it actually pays for itself. Sort of. If you also assume certain key changes in the federal tax code.
If this gambit doesn't work, I'll have to move from argument to negotiation mode. The play here is to reluctantly "give up" something I don't really want in exchange for the crib and dresser set. Unfortunately, we worked together on assembling our list of baby needs and most of the fat, like the Pratesi crib sheets and the Alexander Calder mobile, has already been trimmed. And the wretchedly ugly plastic car seat is a legal requirement.
The baby-industrial complex
When you're expecting a child, there's a whole baby-industrial complex out there just waiting to suck you in, alternately playing on your fears and on your incredible vulnerability to all things cute and tiny. (The little socks! The itty-bitty hats!)
It's deeply insulting, of course, this totally retro idea that, somehow, the brains of pregnant women turn to mush and they lose the ability to, say, look at a price tag or make a rational purchase decision.
But as much as I hate to admit it, there is something to the notion that, in the midst of an experience that represents a fundamental loss of your ability to control even your own body, there is something empowering about being able to buy something beautiful. And lasting. And utterly free of Disney characters and sparkling plasticity.
Several weeks ago, I watched this extraordinary documentary on PBS, A Lion in the House. The short description of it is that it's about kids with cancer, but that definitely doesn't do it justice.
I mean, to be sure, I was sobbing hopelessly by the end, but I also found it deeply engaging and complicated.
When someone is terminally ill, we all tend to say things about wanting him or her to have a "good death," to be at peace, not in pain. Intellectually, we agree that it's "cruel" to prolong someone's suffering with heroic measures that can technically extend life, but do nothing to maintain its quality.
In watching this documentary, though, I got a real sense for just how hard it is to see those distinctions when the patient in question is your loved one, and, especially, your young child.
None of these parents wanted their kids to die in a hospital bed, attached to a bunch of tubes and machines, scared and struggling.
But they also had to be absolutely sure in their own minds that they had done everything possible to save the child.
I've probably come to that point with my damaged hard drive.
The dudes at Geek Squad decreed that nothing on it could be salvaged.
So, on Monday, I went and re-claimed it from them and shipped it off to some high-end "recovery specialists" (yes, my hard drive is in rehab) in Madison, WI.
This morning, the cheeseheads called and gave me a diagnosis of "total mechanical failure." The only hope for rescuing whatever might be left of the novel inovlves taking the drive into a "clean room" and completely disassembling it.
There is, of course, an extra charge for this service.
And, baby, I am paying it.
Because, even though my brain is telling me that the sooner I accept that the material is lost, the better off I'll be, I just have to be able to say that I did everything possible. No gentle goodnight for my hard drive; it's heroic measures all the way.
In an odd side note to all of this, I think that being pregnant has actually helped me through this whole ordeal, which is supposed to be a writer's absolute worst nightmare. I read this article about the effects of elevated progesterone levels on the brain, which says, in part,
During the third trimester of pregnancy, women secrete 20 times more progesterone than during the last two weeks of their normal menstrual cycle. Despite the discomfort of carrying excess weight, many women describe that they never felt better in their lives than during the third trimester of their pregnancies!
So, despite probably having lost a year's worth of work, I've got that blissed-out "everything zen" feeling about life. Which, honestly, is completely out of character.
My first, incredibly clueless, experience of the Air and Water show came in 1998. I was living up in Edgewater then, at Bryn Mawr and Sheridan, and was in my apartment minding my own business when a couple of fighter planes buzzed overhead, bringing with them a terrifying rumble that shook the whole building.
I jumped to the most logical conclusion possible: that Canada was invading us.
So I immediately switched on CNN for details. They were in serious breaking news mode, following U.S. air strikes against Sudan in retaliation for the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I remember thinking, "Who knew that Canada and the Sudan had a secret alliance?"
In the years that followed, I never really did learn to stop worrying and love the air show.
In 2002, I thought, surely there's no way they're going to allow the planes to fly around the Loop high rises anymore, right? I mean, that's just freaky and scary -- not entertaining.
What do I know?
By then, I was dating R., who studied aerospace engineering as an undergrad and can come up with the model names and key details of most planes on sight. We sat on the beach that year and watched the air show and I did find it pretty cool.
Showing off our military might in those pre-Iraq days seemed, well, a little overly rah-rah America for my tastes, but not really in a bad way.
Years later, I still haven't quite sorted out my thoughts on the air show and my experience of it this year was even more complicated than usual.
On the pro side: Watching R., his brother (also an engineer) and 6-year-old nephew get completely geeked out by all the cool technical wizardry of the stuff.
On the con side: Military recruiters eager to chat up obviously enthusiastic 6-year-old nephew.
Pro: Great excuse to sit by lake on summer day.
Con: Hot, crowded, noisy.
Pro: Anti-war protestors offer opportunity for discussion of current issues.
Con: Protesters seem kind of lame and spoil-sport-ish.
Pro: All this impressive military might is on our side.
Con: Much of this impressive military might is being used to target places in the world where the concept of "bombing them back into the stone age" is not that much of a conceptual leap.
It was one of the hottest days of the summer, with the thermometer approaching the 100-degree mark. I was grateful to be in a cool city bus with my daughter, traveling down Fifth Avenue from 80th Street.
The bus was getting more crowded, with a number of people standing.
At one stop, right after a very pregnant woman came aboard, the driver made the following announcement:
“If someone does not get up and give this woman a seat by the next stop, I will turn off the air-conditioning.�
Someone immediately got up and offered this most appreciative woman her seat.
Katrina Markoff arrives a little late for lunch, breathlessly explaining that she has been testing a new product and things aren't going well.
"It's just too hot in Chicago right now," she says. "Nothing is working."
Markoff, the 33-year-old entrepreneur behind Vosges Haut-Chocolate, the gourmet chocolate company with the distinctive purple packaging, offers up a small white takeout food box as evidence: The truffles inside are delicious, but disk flat. Definitely not up to Vosges' (it's pronounced by combining "Vo" --as in Vogue magazine -- with a very French "j" sound, in a single syllable, sort of like "Voujsh") usual standards.
Though frustrated by her morning's work, Markoff seems delighted to have escaped her test kitchen for a relaxing hour at Tiffin, a favorite Devon Avenue Indian restaurant with a bustling buffet line.
"I've always been fascinated with the Indian culture," says Markoff, who grew up the child of a committedly bohemian mother in Fort Wayne, Ind., "and that Naga truffle [a blend of milk chocolate with coconut and sweet Indian curry powder Markoff first cooked up in her North Side apartment nine years ago] really sparked the whole idea of Vosges."
'Rebelled against Cool Whip'
Since Markoff opened her first small chocolate shop at 2105 W. Armitage in 1998, her company has grown from that single store, where she and a partner staffed the counter, to a multimillion-dollar enterprise with stores in Chicago, New York and Las Vegas, plus a catalog and online business. It has consistently earned a spot on Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the country.
In some ways, Markoff says, it all seems meant-to-be.
As a kid, she recalls, "at our garage sale every year, I'd always bake the Easy-Bake oven cakes and sell them with lemonade." Those early sales led to a small business, opened as a high schooler, with friend and early partner in Vosges, Julie Ruedebusch. Selling "strawberry delight cake" to teachers, her parents' friends and a local country club, Markoff was a young gourmet who "rebelled against Cool Whip."
After college at Vanderbilt University, where her course of study -- psychology and chemistry -- seemed perfectly suited for a budding chocolatier, Markoff headed to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and then traveled the world for a year, checking out exotic spice markets and other culinary adventures.
'A storytelling thing'
Markoff retains that spirit of adventure, sampling from nearly every dish on the buffet, and regularly concocting highly original flavor pairings, like bacon-and-chocolate or chocolate-and-yam, each of which feature in her latest collection of truffles.
"We're calling it 'Groove,'" she says, "and the idea is tracing different genres of music, specifically African-American music. So you begin with the oldest field songs, represented by more traditional African flavors like yams and spices, and make your way to hip-hop, with Krug champagne and gold leaf. The collection comes with a CD that has a song for each genre, along with an explanatory booklet."
As she sips a mango lassi, Markoff nearly bubbles over with enthusiasm for this "multi-sensory, multi-media chocolate collection," which represents the latest extension of the super-high-end Vosges brand.
"The brand isn't just about really good chocolate," Markoff says, "it's almost a lifestyle."
For Markoff, who seems to blend an artsy, yoga-influenced hippie-chick persona with serious entrepreneurial savvy, the incredible growth of her business has come as something of a surprise. Her attitude in the early days, she says now, was "there's nothing to lose."
She soon decided to buy out her partner Ruedebusch, since "she felt like there was actually a lot to lose."
"These things are hard," Markoff says now, "because we were friends since grade school."
But Markoff says she just had to see where this idea -- "traveling the world through chocolate" -- would lead.
"It is huge," she says now, with a Valley Girl-esque lilt. "It's unbelievable. And everyone is doing the exotic thing now. ... For me, I never really did it as a trend. I did it as a storytelling thing."
In keeping with her vision, Markoff hasn't taken on any more partners or accepted any private equity investment, though she says, "A lot of people are wanting to invest. They think chocolate is the next big Starbucks thing."
In fact, Markoff, who was married in September 2005, first met her husband, a real estate developer, when he proposed a business partnership. She turned that offer down, but accepted his next proposal, which came several years later.
Now he's helping plan some future retail sites for Vosges, while Markoff focuses on streamlining their manufacturing operations and exploring the possibility of building a highly efficient and environmentally friendly "green" factory somewhere in Chicago.
First, though, she's got to get these new truffles right. Pushing her slightly tousled hair back into a tiny clip, Markoff declares that she has got to run.
"At this point," she says, "I feel like I could work forever and not get done."
Then she smiles and takes a deep breath, inhaling the heady aroma of spices that hangs in the restaurant. The idea of never being done seems to have some real appeal.
William Kaper is apparently unfamiliar with the Saturn test. Kaper, the Barrington attorney who made headlines by suing the ex-wife he'd hoped to re-marry in order to get back the $98,000 engagement ring he'd given her, says he was shocked -- shocked! -- by the raw materialism of the dozens of angry women who left nasty messages on his office phone last week.
"All of them disliked me," he said, sounding just a little too sensitive for the aggressive litigator he actually is, "but none of them even knew me."
The basic gist of the messages was that Kaper's ex-wife was absolutely entitled to keep the five-carat diamond ring, even if they didn't re-marry, as a kind of payment for spending time with him. This line of reasoning struck Kaper, who says he's given his ex-wife lots of other expensive gifts over the years, as rather crass.
But if Kaper is offended by grabbing, gold-digging women, he might want to consider ditching the luxury cars -- a Rolls Royce and a Porsche -- he usually drives and cruising the streets of Barrington in a Saturn instead.
It's all about being honest. Sort of.
I've always found it funny to hear guys who drive expensive cars and throw around a lot cash complain about how women only seem to be interested in them for their money. (The female equivalent of this, of course, is the woman who goes clubbing in a micro-mini and halter top, then wonders why the men she attracts don't seem to value her intelligence.)
Kaper, for his part, says he's tried to avoid this problem by telling women when he first meets them that he works at the post office or sells insurance. And he doesn't show them his $30 million-dollar estate, he says, until the end of the first date.
"After they've seen my home," he says, "they really, really like me. And I don't think it's my good looks or personality or the fact that I like to dance."
When, chatting with him by phone Thursday afternoon, I asked if he'd ever considered waiting a little longer to show off the trappings of his luxe lifestyle, he laughed and answered, "Well, I have to take some advantage of what I have."
And, anyway, he continued, "you have to tell the truth at some point."
Breach of contract
As far as Kaper was concerned the suit he filed against his ex, Dr. Mary Ann Rosanova-Kaper, whom he refers to these days as "Dr. Kaper," was "really just a breach-of-contract suit."
The ring was meant to celebrate an engagement, he says, and, when it became clear that the engagement was off, he wanted it back.
But for a lot of women -- especially the ones who called his office to let him know what they thought of him -- the issue was not nearly so straightforward.
The explanation we like to give in public is that gifts like jewelry are supposed to represent a certain sentiment and, therefore, transcend material value. If we're holding on to a ring from an ex-fiance or a necklace from a former boyfriend, it's because of what the token meant at the time, not some petty concern about what it's now worth.
Unfortunately, when we try to articulate this, it often comes out as, "Honey, I earned that rock!" -- a sentiment that, to the untrained ear, might sound just the slightest bit like an admission of prostitution.
But, really, this is not what we mean.
If you get us in private, though, and ply us with a couple of cocktails, we will generally admit that there might be just the tiniest bit of avarice involved in the whole gifts-from-exes thing. Because getting a guy to give you an outrageously expensive gift is roughly equivalent to shooting a lion on safari. Who wouldn't want to hang on to a trophy that so celebrates your hunting prowess?
Live by the sword, die by the sword
It's a funny thing about $100,000 engagement rings and other such baubles: they so rarely seem to come from Mr. Right.
And while Kaper, who describes himself as a poor South Side kid made good, certainly seems like a nice enough guy, he is also the sort of fellow who just happened to mention the dollar value of his house -- twice -- in our 20-minute phone conversation. He does not seem to subscribe to the it's-the-thought-that-counts school of gift-giving.
As Kaper's suit, which is being withdrawn now that Rosanova-Kaper has given back the ring, briefly emerged as yet another skirmish in the ongoing battle of the sexes, the discussions it generated all seemed to boil down to one essential question: Who started modern courtship down this path of bling-encrusted materialism? Was it men, using money as a shorthand for expressing their emotions, or women, willingly accepting (or even encouraging) the substitution?
I wish I had the answer. But I married a guy who drove me home from our first date in his 5-year-old Saturn.
