Lightfoot, Biden do a political d'oh!-si-d'oh!
& I reveal my snowplow-name ballot
1-19-2023 (issue No. 71)
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
Last week’s winning tweet — and a close runner-up.
Say it ain’t so, Joe and Lo’ — Biden and Lightfoot’s unforced political errors
What? Plowy McPlowface isn’t among the finalists for snowplow names in Chicago?
News and Views — on the alleged WalMart killer, the problem with EVS and a minor change at the Sun-Times.
Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go
Mary Schmich — on reading “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for the first time
Re:Tweets — featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists
Tune of the Week — “Soldier’s Joy”
Last week’s winning tweet
By one vote out of several thousand cast, this tweet edged out:
Therapist: Anyways … Me: “Anyways” isn't a word. You mean “anyway.” Therapist: ANYWAY … we were talking about your difficulty making friends.
That joke has been stolen so many times I can’t identify the source.
Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.
Own goals
Lightfoot and Biden’s mind-boggling self-inflicted political wounds
The story of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s campaign’s spectacularly boneheaded effort to have Chicago Public Schools teachers recruit student volunteers to promote her reelection in exchange for course credit broke too late last Wednesday for inclusion in the Jan. 12 Picayune Sentinel, but it’s not too late to speculate on the damage done, which I believe will be significant.
It was what Hollywood would call a “high concept” error — easy to understand for the average person, not a lot of confusing nuance or ambiguity. It was simply all kinds of wrong.
Heather Cherone’s coverage at WTTW-Ch. 11 led the way, and her headlines alone tell much of the story:
Lightfoot denied any knowledge of the proposal to teachers, which was contained in a mass email signed by a deputy campaign manager. But even if it was just a failure of oversight, as she claims, the buck stops at the top and heads should have rolled.
That they didn’t; that Lightfoot declined to fire the campaign staffer whose name was on the letters, suggests to me that they preferred to keep her close because maybe — and this is speculation — if she felt that she’d been tossed under the bus for a group decision, she might have more to say.
It was a scandalously bad idea, and it knocked the Lightfoot campaign way off message with less than seven weeks to go until the Feb. 28 election. Lightfoot’s ostensible rectitude — her commitment to transparency and integrity — was what made her particularly appealing four years ago.
Meanwhile, Democrats nationwide are slapping their foreheads at the revelation that President Joe Biden also mishandled classified documents and was recently found to have secret papers from his years as vice president stored in unsecured locations.
Yes, Biden’s team cooperated with investigators and didn’t obstruct the return of documents, in contrast to the belligerent, defiant response of former President Donald Trump regarding the classified material in his possession. Trump’s conduct has been several orders of magnitude worse than Biden’s.
But it was political malpractice of the highest order for Biden not to have ordered a thorough search of his home and former offices as soon as it became apparent that Trump’s handling of such material was becoming an issue.
The “yeah, see, everybody does it, no big deal” message from Republican defenders of Trump is now going to have enough resonance with enough voters that it won’t cause any political fallout and may help protect Trump from prosecution.
What? No Plowy McPlowface?
The city’s “You Name a Snowplow” contest/poll is now in the second phase when residents are voting up their favorites.
When the initiative to put fun names of six of the city’s snowplows was launched in December, it put me in mind of when the British government decided in 2016 to let the internet name a new polar research ship. A radio host nominated “Boaty McBoatface,” perhaps the stupidest name he could think of, and of course it was the runaway winner.
“McBoatfacing” has since become a term to describe crowdsourcing pranks, and, in fact, “Plowy McPlowface” won naming contests similar to Chicago’s in Minnesota and Vermont in 2021.
That name doesn’t show up on the list of 50 finalists that Chicago Department of Transportation staff selected out of some 7,000 entries, in part because the city wanted “names and ideas that hadn’t been done elsewhere,” a CDOT spokeswoman told me. Here’s that list of finalists:
Austin Plowers B.B. PlowKing Bean there, plowed that Benny the Bull-izzard Best In Snow Better Call Salt Big Frosty Bill Flurray/Bill Flurry Bozo the Snowplow C3-Psnow Celery Salt BAE Chance the Scraper Chicago Style Plowza City of Big Shovelers Cold Faithful Creedence Clear Road Survival DA PLOW Ernie Snowbanks Ferris Blizzard’s Day Off Hey now, you’re a plow star HeyChicagoWhaddyaPLOW Holy Plow! I Pity the Snow Ice-Ta-La-Vista Ima B. Salty Jean Baptiste Point du Shovel Little Dibbie LollaPLOWlooza Looper Scooper Ludwig Mies van der Snow Megameltasaurus Mrs. O’Leary’s Plow My Kind of Plow’n Off to See the Blizzard O-Plow Winfrey PATROL-SALT-DeSLEET Plowcasso Plows on Parade S’No Worries Salter Payton Sammy Snowsa Sears Plower Sir Salts-A-Lot Sleet Home Chicago Snow Cubs Snow Snow Motion Super Bowl Shovel The Defridgerator Perry The Great Plow-dini The Plowminator
I urge you to go here before the end of the month and vote for these six: Better Call Salt Chance the Scraper Holy Plow! Jean Baptiste Point du Shovel LollaPLOWlooza Super Bowl Shovel
Monica Eng at Axios Chicago favors “O-plow Winfrey” and “Mrs. O'Leary's Plow,” and expresses dismay that "Mr. Plow" and "Barack Snowbama" aren’t in the final 50.
Sidney Madden at City Cast Chicago awards her gold medals to “Austin Plowers” and “Mrs. O’Leary’s Plow.”
My Gen X former colleague Colleen Kujawa favors “Sir Salts-A-Lot” and my seventh pick, if I had one, “City of Big Shovelers.”
News & Views
News: ‘The US government will not seek the death penalty for Patrick Crusius, who allegedly killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso more than three years ago.’
View: Crusius could still face the death penalty in state court, and this unexplained decision by the U.S. Department of Justice seems to be in line with President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to abolish the federal death penalty. But still. These sorts of decisions continue to underscore the arbitrary incoherence of capital punishment and ought to give execution enthusiasts pause. Crusius reportedly confessed to arresting officers and told them he was targeting Hispanics, making his alleged offense one of the most heinous hate crimes in recent history.
News: Illinois could lose billions in motor fuel taxes as electric vehicle sales grow, report warns
View: The obvious solution to this will be to replace the motor fuel tax with a vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) tax, an idea I promoted in a 2018 column that was not, I admit, all that popular with readers.
Are there drawbacks and pitfalls? Sure! The main concern about VMT taxes is the threat that implementing them poses to privacy. Measuring not only how many miles a person drives but where he or she drives requires the installation and use of GPS technology that theoretically allows The Man (or divorce lawyers or data-mining capitalists) to retrospectively map your movements.
Yes, some of that tracking can be done now with toll transponders and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, but the idea of the government knowing where your car is and has been at all times is a dilapidated bridge too far for many people. This is true even for those not committing crimes or headed to illicit assignations.
Deviously clever people would probably find ways to hack the system and avoid paying a VMT tax for all the miles they drive. Retrofitting every car on the road with devices that upload mileage data and equipping the state with the hardware and software to process that data and collect VMT taxes would require a significant upfront investment from a state already awash in red ink.
I got a lot of heated mail saying such a tax would be unthinkable, so I invite critics to submit better ideas about how to fund roads, bridges and other elements of the vehicular infrastructure.
News: On Fridays since early December, the Chicago Sun-Times has been replacing editorials with op-ed essays.
View: I hope this is just a start on the way to eliminating the conceit of a newspaper having a disembodied editorial “voice.” I’ve previously argued that this tradition is weird and moldy.
I wrote to Lorraine Forte, Sun-Times editorial page editor, to ask about the change. She replied, “We may or may not continue running an op-ed on Friday rather than an editorial. We're doing it in order to give more space for op-eds, keep providing readers with worthwhile editorials and also devote more time to figuring out some new ways to reach readers. Seemed a low-risk way to accomplish all three. We'll see where it all goes.”
The Tribune bailed out a while back on Saturday editorials in favor of guest essays (I can’t even remember when the Sun-Times ran Saturday editorials), and some Tribune editorials are now written by uncredited freelancers in order to fill the maw. Both papers could use more staff columnists. UPDATE: Tribune editorial page editor Chris Jones takes issue with “uncredited” since, if you delve into chicagotribune.com you will find that freelancer Greg Burns, a former staff member of the Editorial Board, is indeed credited on “Meet the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.”
Nauseating public piety from four mayoral candidates
This front-page photo in Wednesday’s Tribune —
— put me in mind of Matthew 6: 5-8:
When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. … When you pray, go into your room and shut the door …
I’m not a Bible guy, understand. I’m a Constitution guy who wants my public officials to be scrupulous about separating church and state. I’m hoping that when the other candidates meet with the Tribune, they don’t engage in this sort of pandering, ostentatious religiosity.
Land of Linkin’
Sincere get-well wishes to my former colleague John Kass, who posted this update on his health on his WGN podcast feed. John and I have our political and personal differences, as regular readers know, but these struggles and situations are bigger than that. I look forward to him outraging me again with a new column on his website in the very near future.
Columbia Journalism Review: “Is Twitter dying? And what would that mean for journalism?” “How do newsrooms get the attention and readership they need for their work now? How do they engage their audiences in a compelling way? How do they ensure their work is relevant and noticed by the people who need to see it? None of us wants to do great journalism that no one reads.”
I’m a sucker for stories like “There Are No Hills in Orland Hills” by Chicago Magazine’s Edward Robert McClelland. One suburb he didn’t mention in his survey was Carol Stream. There is no eponymous stream in that DuPage County village, but there was a woman named Carol Stream, and it was her developer father who literally put her on the map. I’m still proud of the 1991 profile I wrote about her. She died in 2020.
I’m avidly following Campside Media’s latest season of the Chameleon podcast “Dr. Dante” about hypnotist/criminal Ronald Pellar, a man with Chicago roots whose trail of audacious flim-flammery is alternately amusing and outrageous. I kinda sorta had his number in this 1985 Tribune profile, but it included this regrettable assessment: “Dante does not appear to be a con man. Just a classic pitchman.” In fact, Pellar/Dante, who died at 83 in 2013, was an unrepentant crook and flagrant liar. This webpage provides a crisp written history that makes that case if you’re not into listening to a whole podcast series.
A reader sent along “In Defense of Offense,” a 2011 New York Times essay by former talk-show host Dick Cavett: “I’ve never quite understood why this word — ‘offended’ — is so horrifying. What doesn’t offend somebody? And who wants to see, read or write anything that is simon-pure in its inability to offend those dreaded ‘someones’? … You’d think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb.”
Are assault weapons bans effective? See Factcheck.org, PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker.
Corrected link: In Tuesday’s Picayune Sentinel, I somehow neglected to credit former WBEZ-FM 91.5 program director Ken Davis for his wonderful tribute to veteran radio engineers.
The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesdays 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.
A compelling salvo in the ‘reading wars’
I’m not a student of the factional battles in education over how best to teach children to learn to read, but Emily Hanford’s new six-part podcast series “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” reinforced my belief — based on experiences with my own kids — that phonics is the way to go even though, yes, it’s strongly embraced by conservatives.
Hanford, a former reporter, producer and acting news director at WBEZ-FM 91.5, is the senior education correspondent for American Public Media. She’s been pursuing this story for years, to the point where she has become an influential combatant. Parents of budding readers will find “Sold a Story” to be interesting and useful, at least, and most likely quite persuasive.
Here’s a snippet of transcript from the end of the final episode:
Since we began releasing this podcast last month, my inbox and social media feeds have been flooded. I'm hearing from people who are saying, “I know, I know this cueing stuff. I've been trying to tell people about it for years.”
And I'm hearing from teachers who are saying, “I didn't know. I feel terrible. I'm going to do better. “
And I'm hearing from a lot of parents. They're saying, “Wow this is me. This is my kid. This is our story.”
I'm hearing from critics, too; people who are saying I've gotten it wrong. I've misunderstood Marie Clay. I'm attacking teachers. I'm creating controversy.
And I'm hearing from another group of people: Children. Kids are listening to this podcast. I'm not sure I was really expecting that. Last week I got this from the mother of a boy who's in fourth grade. She wrote, “Today when I dropped him off for basketball and we were mid episode-one, h said, “Turn it off, and don't listen again until I get back in the car.”
I love that kids are listening to this. This is about kids. It's about doing what's right for them.
Mary Schmich: On finally reading ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’
My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is her most recent offering:
Back in the early 1990s, when I was living in Atlanta and covering the South for the Chicago Tribune, I used to see a middle-aged woman walking the track at my health club in Peachtree Center. She always seemed very determined, though she didn't walk very fast. She looked vaguely familiar. I finally asked someone who she was.
“Coretta,” the person said.
I was incredulous. “Coretta Scott King?” I said.
It was. The widow, the legend, the regular woman trying to get fit.
I look back on the nearly five years I reported on the South as an amazing education. Or maybe the better word is illumination. And not only because it gave me a way to learn the past and present of the place I’d grown up—Georgia, the South— but because the people we associate with that pivotal place and time so often wound up in my path, which included the indoor health club track.
I got to sit down and talk at length with Andy Young, former Atlanta mayor and one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s confidants. I got to interview Ralph Abernathy, another King confidant, after he wrote a book that wasn’t always kind to King; I still remember the lede on that story, that Abernathy had become the man “who broke the family code of taste and trust.”
I got to attend a reenactment of the famous march on Selma and then marched through the hot Alabama countryside with Hosea Williams, another member of King’s inner circle.
I got to write about Jacqueline Smith, the former desk clerk at the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot to death, who refused to leave when the motel was closed to make way for a civil rights museum.
I got to go to the big Southern cities and the little Southern towns and report on the ways the South was reckoning with race—with racism—while many other parts of the racist country were still trying to kid themselves that racism was primarily a Southern thing.
I say "got to" because I consider those moments among the greatest gifts of my life.
We call all of that history now, but it was white-hot history then, still clearly bubbling into the present, not fully fixed in time. What I learned during those years guided me through the subsequent years trying to decipher Chicago, which when I arrived seemed to me as overtly racist as any place I’d ever been. King himself once said, “I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
But one thing I never did? I never read King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Most of us have heard of that letter, as surely as we’ve heard of the “I Have a Dream” speech. It never occurred to me to read it, though, until Martin Luther King Day earlier this week when I heard someone on the radio talking about the ways King and his legacy are simplified and sanitized. Anyone who wants to understand him, who wants to understand his approach to non-violence, the speaker said, should read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
So I just spent a few minutes doing that. It’s stunning. Urgent. Eloquent. A piece of the past, a message for today. A reminder that there's so much history still to learn and understand and use.
Here is a link to the full letter. It’s worth your time.
— Mary Schmich
Minced Words
Lots of book chat in the above pre-roll video of “The Mincing Rascals” this week. Should one borrow books from friends or loan them? Or should one simply purchase books and give them away? Columnist/author Neil Steinberg, host John Williams and I had a robust discussion before the podcast even began. We went on to talk in the podcast about the race for Chicago mayor — including Neil’s personal fondness for candidate Willie Wilson — gun restrictions, unlucky field-goal kickers and much more. 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.
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:
Did you know if you rearrange all the letters in TOM BRADY and replace them with different letters you get HAIL SATAN? Makes you think. — @BuckyIsotope
Teenagers are actually very well behaved for people who just learned everything's bullshit. — @FuturePopop
Who knew our "nest egg" would turn out to be actual eggs? — @WilliamAder
After trying to research skin care methods and finding too much conflicting advice I have decided to age swiftly and devastatingly in a mossy green cloak with a gnarled walking stick in my hand and crow on my shoulder. — @Jamberee13
If you believe me when I exclaim, “We really should get together soon!” that’s on you. — @nayele18maybe
It’s so funny how what Bed Bath & Beyond meant by “beyond” was just, like, kitchen. — @MNateShyamalan
Cobra & Mongoose. He's a cobra... she's a mongoose. They say opposites attract but can two unlikely partners find love? No. Oh Jesus, don't look. — @IamJackBoot
[last day of creative writing class] "Are you ready to name your band?" Dave Matthews: “You bet I am.” — @clichedout
More things should be rigged to blow. That’s always an exciting attribute for an object to have. — @camerobradford
Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can’t move. So it’s not the windows that make the car go, it’s something else entirely. — @pjayevans
Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.
Tune of the Week
Do you have a tune or a song that changed your life? I do. It’s this particular version of the old dance tune “Soldier’s Joy” on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the 1972 double album featuring the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and a host of country and bluegrass luminaries.
“Soldier’s Joy” is known as a fiddle tune, but here it’s played on two banjos — one by Earl Scruggs using the popular three-finger bluegrass picking style that he pioneered and that bears his name; the other by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member John McEuen using the older, traditional clawhammer (or frailing) style.
The FiddleHed site says:
“Soldiers Joy” has roots in Scottish and Irish music traditions and can be traced back as far as the mid-1700s. In fact, even Robert Burns used it as the tune for the first song in his cantata “The Jolly Beggars” in 1785. Despite its upbeat tempo and catchy melody, the term “soldier’s joy” took on a much darker meaning than is portrayed by the tune around the time of the Civil War. Opinion has it that this term eventually came to refer to the combination of whiskey, beer, and morphine used by Civil War soldiers, presumably for pain relief.
I was 14 when my dad brought “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” home, and I became utterly entranced by the interplay of the banjos, particularly the drive of Scruggs’ instrument on “Soldier’s Joy.” I decided I wanted to make a banjo sound like that. So I signed up for bluegrass lessons. My teacher — Willard Spencer of the RFD Boys — started me out on “Cripple Creek,” but I insisted that “Soldier’s Joy” be the second song he taught me. I got decent on the five-string, formed a band, played in the school talent show, played and called for local square dances and developed an interest in instrumental traditional music that supplemented the interest my dad had nurtured in me in traditional vocal music.
I ultimately came to prefer the clawhammer style to the Scruggs style — you can see as well as hear the contrast in this live version of the tune — but have more or less set the banjo aside in recent years for the fiddle, my main musical preoccupation these days.
Father’s Joy
My younger son Ben took up all these interests — it got him a scholarship to college in West Virginia where he met our future daughter-in-law — and fairly quickly exceeded me on every instrument. And it felt like life came full circle Monday night at the Irish-American Heritage Center when I called for the Chicago Barn Dance Company and Ben played the fiddle. After the last waltz, he and his band broke into “Soldier’s Joy.”
I caught some of it on video:
That’s Aaron Smith on bass and Kathy Hirsh on guitar.
Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!
The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues on Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. Thanks for reading!
I hate to say it, but I none of the alleged funny tweets got even a mild chuckle from me.
And why do we have to name a snow plow?
Why can't electric vehicle chargers be sold with built in meters that track the amount of energy that is used to recharge a vehicle? Electricity is already metered for billing purposes. Gasoline contains definable amounts of energy, and it is taxed on a per-gallon (amount of energy) basis. Why not do the same for EV chargers and electricity?