Best guesses: A look back and a look ahead
& a super-size Christmas-themed Tweet of the Week poll
12-22-2022 (issue No. 67)
Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.
This week
Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go
Mary Schmich — Memories and Christmas
Re:Tweets — featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s extra-long list of Christmas-themed finalists
Tune of the Week — One more great but little-known Christmas song
If you’re stuck for a holiday gift, a subscription to the Picayune Sentinel will surprise and delight every clever person on your list!
Last week’s winning tweet
Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.
Looking back at our predictions for 2022
I’m continuing the year-end tradition I oversaw for many years at the Chicago Tribune and am asking readers to join me in attempting to predict the news of the next 12 months. The point, as always, is not to be right but to ponder for a moment all that lies ahead.
Readers helped me develop this year’s multiple-choice prediction survey, and I’ll reveal the results along with my own guesses next Thursday.
But before I link to those questions, let’s take a look back at how readers and I did predicting 2022.
A majority or plurality of readers and I correctly agreed on the following predictions:
That the U.S. death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic — about 814,000 at the end of 2021 would not nearly double to 1.5 million or more. The actual increase was about 270,00, and the current estimated death toll is a little under 1.1 million.
That the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision.cinfl
That Republicans would win control of the U.S. House in the November 2022 election.
That Donald Trump would not be criminally indicted.
That Democratic incumbent Gov. JB Pritzker would win reelection.
That Alexi Giannoulias would win the Democratic primary for Illinois secretary of state.
That Ald. Ed Burke, 14th, indicted in May 2019 on federal racketeering and corruption charges, would still be awaiting trial at year’s end. The trial is now scheduled to begin in early November 2023.
That Fritz Kaegi would be reelected as Cook County assessor.
That city Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin would not enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That former Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson would not enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That Mayor Lori Lightfoot would run for reelection.
That Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, would not enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas would enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That entrepreneur/philanthropist Willie Wilson would enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That the Chicago Sky would not repeat as WNBA champs.
That pesky QB Aaron Rodgers would play the 2022 season with the Green Bay Packers.
That the White Sox would have a better record than the Cubs.
Meanwhile, readers and I incorrectly guessed that:
Fraternal Order of Police head John Catanzara would enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson would not enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That President Joe Biden’s approval rating would rise from 44% in the FiveThirtyEight.com average to 50% or higher at the end of 2022. It’s currently 43%
That former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan would not be criminally indicted in 2022.
That Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed remake of "West Side Story" would win a major Oscar. Best supporting actress was the highest award given to the film.
That Alabama would win the NCAA football championship. It was Georgia.
That former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows would be criminally indicted.
That the number of homicides in Chicago would be higher than 800 — the approximate number in 2021. So far in 2022, the number is roughly 675.
That Mayor Lori Lightfoot would replace Chicago police Superintendent David Brown.
That the Bears would finalize their move to Arlington Heights. So far there’s been a lot of portentous ground pawing, but the team has reached no deal with the suburb.
That injured, aging golf legend Tiger Woods would not make the cut in any of golf's four major championships. He made the cut in the Masters and PGA Championship.
That the Chicago Bulls would win at least one playoff round in the NBA postseason. They lost the opening best-of-seven series to the Milwaukee Bucks four games to one.
Here, readers guessed correctly and I guessed incorrectly:
That developers would break ground on a Chicago casino complex.
That Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates would not enter the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago.
That the inflation rate, then at 6.8%, would be greater than 3% in mid-December 2022. It’s at about 7.1% now.
And I guessed correctly and the hive mind guessed incorrectly when I predicted:
That Democrats would retain control of the U.S. Senate.
That Donald Trump would submit to a deposition or give other testimony under oath.
That Jussie Smollett would spend time behind bars for lying to police about staging a hate crime against himself. He served six days of a 150-day sentence in Cook County Jail before being released while he appeals his conviction.
That state Sen. Darren Bailey of Xenia would be the Republican nominee for governor. Readers guessed it would be never-Trumper Congressman Adam Kinzinger.
That Raymond Lopez would not enter the 2023 race for Chicago mayor. He said he was in but got out before submitting petitions.
That Donald Trump would endorse winning candidates in at least three open U.S. Senate seats then held by Republicans. He backed winners in four such primaries — Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Alabama.
My record, 23-16, beat the readers’ record of 20-19.
There are 30 questions in this year’s predict-the-news survey. Please fill it out and share it with your most clairvoyant friends.
News & Views
News: The House Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years of former president Donald Trump’s tax returns; Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson refuses to release his returns.
View: The law should require that all candidates for federal office, for Cabinet positions, for seats on the federal bench and for statewide offices provide such documents. Cities and counties can make their own rules but should err on the side of disclosure.
News: Purdue Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon has apologized for briefly mocking the sound of Asian languages at commencement, but many are still calling for his head.
View: Keon made a dumb, insensitive, tone-deaf joke in an impromptu effort to riff on the odd digression of the keynote speaker before him— Hammond, Indiana, radio host Jim Dedelow — who prattled a bit in what he called a made-up foreign language that sounded vaguely Eastern European.
I’m sure I need not explain to the discerning readers of the Picayune Sentinel that it’s fine to mimic and affect certain accents — British, French, German, Eastern European (evidently) — but, due to cultural contexts and histories of bigotry and discrimination, it’s off limits to mimic and affect others. Had Keon sputtered less than two seconds of, say, Scandinavian-sounding jibberish, there would be no story here.
“We are all human. I made a mistake, and I assure you I did not intend to be hurtful,” Keon wrote in an open letter when he came under fire. “My comments do not reflect my personal or our institutional values. … I am truly sorry for my unplanned, off-the-cuff response to another speaker, as my words have caused confusion, pain, and anger,. I did not intend to be hurtful.” He added that he “will learn from this and assure you that Purdue Northwest and I will take action to prevent such missteps from occurring in the future.”
An outraged Tribune op-ed by Vietnamese American journalist Crystal Bui put the word apology in quotes in describing Keon’s statement because he did not “take more responsibility” and did not explicitly admit he was guilty of “racism.” As if that would have appeased those demanding his resignation or dismissal.
As usual, linguist and contributing columnist John McWhorter at The New York Times responded to this explosion of umbrage with common sense in “When a Racist Joke Does Not Merit Cancellation.”
The issue here is degree. Based on the kind of responses we have seen so much of especially since the spring of 2020, it is conceivable that Purdue will give in to the pressure of aggrieved public opposition and we will read of Keon’s dismissal sometime after Christmas.
That would be wrong. If Purdue instead stands its ground, it will be a gesture in favor not of racism but of reason — a holiday gift of sorts to our public discourse.
I do not deny that Keon’s joke was racist. I would have cringed if I had been in attendance. However, how much racism is in question here? Is it not true that there is still a difference between racism that — however obnoxious — is nonetheless careless or accidental as opposed to intended to send a racist message? (We’ve seen all too much of the latter in the past few years.) Is it true that we must treat racism as a kind of cyanide, where even a trace amount in a glass of water is lethal?
The idea that one tacky joke constitutes the measure of a whole human being has begun to seem almost ordinary of late. However, it is a quite extraordinary idea and even rather medieval. Too often, it is wielded in a fashion that is extremist, unreflexive and recreationally hostile.
McWhorter, who is Black, went on:
If Keon has a record of petty racist offenses, then it is more reasonable to treat this recent episode as a straw breaking the camel’s back. … (But if) he just turned out not to have gotten the memo on what’s funny and permissible now versus when he was young, then he should keep his job. Few would have considered that a radical proposition until recently. … A mature society does not wreck people’s careers because of a single gaffe, even a racially insensitive one.
News: Undercover right-wing journalists have kicked up a social media fuss by revealing that Chicago’s Francis W. Parker School showed teenagers butt plugs and dildos at sex-education session aimed at LGBTQ youth.
View: Meh. The 30-minutes session, last spring, was optional and attended by just six students. And Parker is a private school. Myself, I don’t see the necessity or the value in show-and-tell with sex toys, nor do I see the harm — kids these days, they know things, they’ve seen things!
If attendance at the presentation had been mandatory and Parker were a public school, I’d be opposed, though not stridently. There is a line between explanation and encouragement that it sounds as though Parker may have crossed. But this strikes me as a matter that Parker parents and Parker administrators can and should deal with on their own.
Heather Cherone of WTTW-Ch. 11 has a somewhat different take on this story that she expressed in no uncertain terms on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast.
News: Billionaire art collector Ken Griffin has moved his masterpieces from Chicago museums to Florida museums.
View: I wish those who fetishize old art and spend tens of millions of dollars to own it — “purchases by Griffin include a Cézanne that cost $60.5 million, a Jasper Johns that cost $80 million, a Jean-Michel Basquiat that cost $100 million, and a Barnett Newman that cost $84.2 million” — would start directing their fortunes toward supporting living, working artists with purchases that go into the pockets of the artists rather than the pockets of previous investors and collectors.
Land of Linkin’
Slate’s Molly Olmstead offers, “’Tis the Season to Debunk Your Family’s Hunter Biden Conspiracy Theories,” on the off chance that you have invited to your holiday meal a deranged blowhard who thinks Hunter Biden’s laptop will result in a political scandal to make Watergate look like a birthday party for perfectly behaved 1st Graders from the Gilded Age.
On the Economist’s list of best podcasts of 2022:“Can I Tell You a Secret?” “Death of an Artist,” “Ghost Church,” “How We Survive,” “Not Lost,” “The Run-Up,” “Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV,” “Wild Boys,” “Will be Wild” and “Were We Three.”
Apple recently announced the 2022 Apple Podcasts Award winner: The Roe v. Wade season of Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast. My wife and occasional Picayune Sentinel contributor Johanna Zorn was on the editing team. On Apple’s list of top new podcasts of 2022: “The Deck,” “Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade,” “The Thing About Helen and Olga,” “The Trojan Horse Affair,” “The Seduction,” “Betrayal,” “The Always Sunny Podcast.” “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra,” “Very Scary People,” “Twin Flames,” “Killed,” “Dateline: Missing in America,” “The Execution of Bonny Lee Bakley,” “Back to the Beach with Kristin and Stephen,” “Internal Affairs,” “Father Wants Us Dead,” “The Sunshine Place,” “Fed Up” and “American Radical.”
In “Boondoggle of the Year: Cryptocurrency,“ Matt Ford of The New Republic writes, “Crypto is not real. … it has no intrinsic value and is untethered to anything but the shared belief by many people that it is actually worth something. (Neither is the dollar, crypto folks are often quick to note, but cryptocurrencies do not have 12 aircraft carriers and a nuclear arsenal and a system of courts that can enforce debts.) … Crypto has surely made some of its early adopters rich, but that number is far outweighed by now by the many thousands of people it has robbed.”
“Can a hobby keep dementia at bay? Experts weigh in,” in The Washington Post. “While there is as yet no surefire way to prevent dementia or cure it, the Lancet in 2020 identified 12 potentially modifiable risk factors for the condition.”
“Oak Park considers ranked choice voting — Proponents of the system believe it will decrease political polarization”
“The 25 Best TV Episodes of 2022”: Rolling Stone offers another list to fight about.
Again, don’t neglect to fill out and share the Picayune Sentinel’s 30-question Predict-The-News survey. It’s a holiday tradition like no other.
“Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?” by The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro.
The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here. Early warning that I’ll be guest-hosting Joan’s entire show on Thursday, Dec. 29 from 2 to 5 p.m.
The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.
Mary Schmich on a Christmas full of holes
My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is the passage from her 1996 Christmas Day column that we read every year from the stage at Songs of Good Cheer:
For many of us, Christmas comes full of holes. A parent who died. A sibling who moved far away. A family member estranged from the family.
Someone, it seems, is always missing, someone with whom we once shared Christmas and without whom Christmas seems a shade paler than before……..For years, it has been true in my family.
No matter how big or festive the assembly, some ghost is always hovering near the turkey and the tree.
But even as I lament that none of them will be with us, I know that all of them will.
We'll do what families do, plugging the holes in Christmas present with memories of Christmases come and gone, telling stories to conjure up the ghosts.
The spirits of the absent guests always remind me that Christmas is never just one Christmas.
It is the sum of all the Christmases you've known and all the people who have inhabited them.
Perhaps more than any other day, Christmas is the measure of passing time the collective clock by which we count out our lives.
It's a mutating event anchored in unchanging rituals. New characters join any family's cast--new spouses, babies, lovers--but the old cast is still clattering around in the wings.
In my family, we usually take a moment at the Christmas meal to raise a glass and say, "To those who can't be with us."
And in that moment, they are.
—Mary Schmich, 1996
Minced Words
Heather Cherone and I joined host John Williams for Wednesday’s recording of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. Among other topics, we discussed winter storms, tax returns, the Chicago mayor’s race and a sex education session at Francis W. Parker School that involved the passing around of butt plugs and dildos.*
Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.
*Just to be sure of this spelling I Googled “dildos.” Now we wait for the algorithm to serve me endless ads for them.
Re: Tweets
In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the classic Tweet of the Week contest in which the template for the poll does not allow the use of images. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:
The new nominees for Tweet of the Week, expanded Christmas edition:
They gloss over it for the sake of children, but the line “thumpety thump, thump, thumpety thump, thump, look at Frosty go” is about Frosty the Snowman bashing villagers over the head with a crowbar. — @badbanana
Mariah Carey beginning with “I don’t want a lot for Christmas” and then revealing she wants “you” is such a good burn. — @iamchrisscott
Santa keeps a pair of mounted antlers over his fireplace to keep the reindeer from unionizing. — @WoodyLuvsCoffee
Mary: Can you rub my feet? Joseph: is there a way I can do that without actually touching them, and yet somehow, as if by magic, you still benefit? Mary: OK, I can tell you're still angry. — @FredTaming
I’m not anti-Christmas; I’m just pro-humbug. — @TheAlexNevil
Never assume that's her "ugly" Christmas sweater...I know this now. — @silkymilky14
How old were you when you realized that if the gift card said “from mom and dad,” 98% of the times your dad had no idea what the gift was. — @Havish_AF
Why aren't there more Christmas songs about revenge? — @JohnLyonTweets
Do or do not. There is no Santa. — @JimmerThatisAll
Why would I not be able to recall the "most famous" reindeer of all? —@drankturpentine
It’s wild how someone lied about how they got pregnant 2000 years ago and now I have an air fryer. — @videojame_
The most unbelievable thing about “Die Hard” is that the office Christmas party is happening on Christmas Eve. — @ObscureGent
Money was so tight last Christmas, I had to sell a kidney so I could afford gifts for my kids. But this year it's even worse: I’m actually having to contemplate selling one of my own kidneys. — @WheelTod
Most people don't consider the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" a Christmas song but my kids soon will. — @RickAaron
Don’t forget the real moral of Rudolph's story is that no one will like you until you have something they want or need. — @pineapplepleas
Peace on earth, Goodwill to men.* *I give all men on my list gifts from Goodwill. — @RickAaron
[opening presents on the 5th day of Christmas] "I'm gonna be real with you Karen. If there's more birds in this box I'm leaving you" — @SortaBad
This year for Christmas I'm renting a really nice car & putting a giant red bow on it so the neighbors think I have a girlfriend. — @WoodyLuvsCoffee
Is it “shit show” or “shitshow?” I wanna get this holiday family newsletter right. — @itsBABYSMITH
Technically, every dollar I’ve spent on toys and treats for my kids is hush money — @RickAaron
[office party, 1842] Ralph Waldo Emerson: The only gift is a portion of thyself Me: Look Ralph, the rules to Secret Santa were very clear. — @TheToddWilliams
If a package marked "FRAGILE" arrives and you don't say "FRAH JEE LAY! It must be Italian!", are you still a dad? — @perlhack
Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.
Tune of the Week
One more great but little-known Christmas song? Well, sure! “Who Am I to Bear You Here?” — often called “Christ Child Lullaby” — is gorgeous and haunting, one of the few carols written in the voice of Mary. It expresses not only her joy but her wonder, awe and even fear, similar to what all new parents feel, really.
The first verse we sang at Songs of Good Cheer years ago are little different that what you hear in this video:
My love, my pride, my treasure-o My wonder new and pleasure-o My son, my beauty, ever you Who am I to bear you here?
Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!
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Eric, I think this is the best collection of tweets I've seen in ages! I call them the potato chip tweets- I can't pick/eat just one.
you state that Heather Cherone has a somewhat different take on the story [Francis Parker/sex toys] that she expressed in no uncertain terms on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. i'm not interested in listening to the entire pod to get her opinion - is there a transcript available? or a link to the text of her opinion?