Am I proud to be an American as this July 4 approaches?
Not exactly
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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.
Unpopular opinions?
Pride and patriotism at 250
Pollsters have lately been asking variations of the question, “Are you proud to be an American?”
It’s a strange question, really, since pride is something generally associated with personal accomplishment. I would never say, for example, that I’m proud of your success or the success of your children or your spouse. I might well admire it and admire you for your role in nurturing that success, but to say I’m proud would suggest I had something to do with it.
Do I feel lucky to be a U.S. citizen? Yes. Would I rather live here than any other country in the world? For now, yes. Despite our endemic problems, our messy history and our current frighteningly unhinged president, I’m on balance glad to be here —living under a system I had no role in creating amid natural and manmade wonders that I simply enjoy.
I honor the ideals of our nation and our many glorious achievements, artistic and cultural accomplishments and advances in human rights. I’m appalled and angry at America’s failings and disappointed in the ways we fall short. I’m cautiously hopeful about our future. The word “pride” doesn’t work its way into my thinking as we approach Saturday’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Here are some poll results that suggest many others are feeling this ambivalence:
I feel somewhat the same about the word “patriotic,” which I’ve come to associate with an obtuse “my country, right or wrong” jingoism embraced by nationalists. I love what this country stands for, but certainly not close to everything that its government and people do. We have flown the flag in front of our house for Independence Day off and on over years, and I’m never sure what message I’m sending or what message is being received.
Anyway, all this woolgathering should lead to a poll question, so here:
June 16th poll result
Garry Spelled Correctly — I’ve been advocating that the US should follow the lead of many European countries where the parties to a marriage or civil union just go to the clerk’s office, fill out the forms, the clerk checks them over and then signs off on them and they are then legally married or in a civil union.
Then if the couple so chooses, they can have whatever type of formal ceremony they want, religious, non-religious or just a party with friends & family!
The need for some person to officiate at a wedding is just an obsolete remnant of the past!
Jake H. — The internet suggests to me that it’s super easy to get married here, and harder in Europe. You can’t just go to the clerk there and get married right away. You have to apply and wait as they do a more rigorous check of eligibility, and then you often have to get married before a public official (as opposed to any old officiant) apart from or prior to any private/religious ceremony.
Here, you can get married in two days. Day 1: Get your license at the Clerk’s office, hardly anything required, just a driver’s license or similar. Day 2 (or within 60 days): Get married by a judge right downstairs in a five-minute walk-in ceremony, or by an officiant at a private ceremony.
I agree that an officiant should not be necessary, so long as there is a return of the marriage certificate form establishing a date certain for the marriage. Internet says Colorado allows self-solemnization already. That seems reasonable, given that anyone can easily become an officiant anyway.
I suppose we could remove our teeny tiny one-day waiting period between license issuance and ceremony (solemnization), as most states have done -- such that you could get your license and then go downstairs right that same day for your ceremony -- but it seems reasonable to prevent true spur-of-the-moment marriages. Maybe that’s silly, too paternalistic, I don’t know. In any case, if we did do that, our system would be just as you want, far more so than in Europe, and it apparently already is that way in more than half of all states. .
Michael Weiland — Ten years ago my nephew and his fiancée asked me to officiate their wedding. I got myself ordained by the Universal Life Church (free), which was probably unnecessary. I checked with the Lake County Clerk’s office to be sure. They said if the bride & groom are satisfied that the officiant is acceptable, that’s all fine. What really matters is that the marriage license be obtained, executed and submitted. Everything else is optional.
Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses
Death prep
Monica Metzler — You made note of Arti Shah’s useful list of steps to take to assure your family has access to important digital information “if you died tomorrow.”
We all know how important it is that we do this — especially those without children — but we all put it off. I spent the last few years managing my mother’s affairs and then her estate. Even though, as a former attorney, she was way more organized and prepared than 99% of people, and she was very open about anything (including finances) with her children, it was still a lot of work to figure out and wrap up someone else’s life.
I’m sharing the content of Shah’s thread here because not all of us have access to Twitter/X and because we all need to do all these things:
1. iPhone Users, go to Settings > your name > Sign-In & Security > Legacy Contact. Assign someone you trust. An access key linked to them is generated. The moment they present that key along with a death certificate, your entire iCloud will open up. Photos, files, emails, notes. Everything. Skip this and your family will spend months battling bureaucracy with no guarantee that it will work.
2. Google Accounts, go to http://myaccount.google.com/inactive. Set a timer for how long Google waits before taking action. Then assign people and decide exactly what each one can see. One person gets Gmail. Another gets Drive. Another gets Photos. You control the split. Google checks with you first. No response means the people you chose gain access automatically.
3. Password Manager Everything else depends on this. Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane all have an Emergency Access setting hidden in the account options. Add a contact, set a waiting period of around 7 days, and if you stay silent long enough, the vault opens for them. 1Password works differently. Print the Emergency Kit PDF, which contains your credentials and secret key, and store it in a physical location.
4. Social Accounts. On Facebook go to Settings > Accounts Center > Personal Details > Account Ownership and Control > Memorialization Settings Assign someone or set up the account to be automatically deleted. The contact you choose can manage the profile publicly, but cannot access private messages or impersonate you.
5. The PIN of your phone. The detail that almost everyone overlooks. Every two-factor authentication code lives on your phone. Without the PIN, your family can’t get past the login screen of anything. Tell one person. Write it down. Keep it with your documents.
6. One-page document. Gather everything on a single sheet. Where the password manager resides and how to access it. Where the seed phrases are physically stored. The phone’s PIN. Who handles access to Apple and Google. Any account containing real money or value. Two printed copies. One kept under lock and key. One with a person you completely trust. Review it every year
7. Financial Accounts. Most people assume their family knows where the money is. They’re usually wrong. Make a list of every bank account, brokerage account, retirement account, insurance policy, and loan. You don’t need to include passwords. Just document what exists and where it exists. An account nobody knows about might as well not exist.
8. Insurance Policies Life insurance. Health insurance. Home insurance. Vehicle insurance. Policies are only useful if someone knows they exist. Write down the provider, policy number, and contact details. Millions go unclaimed every year simply because families never knew the policy existed.
9. Bills and Subscriptions. The payments won’t stop when you do. Mortgage. Rent. Utilities. Phone plans. Streaming services. Software subscriptions. Create a list of recurring payments and where they are charged. It prevents unnecessary stress during an already difficult time.
10. Crypto Assets. A crypto wallet without the recovery phrase is often gone forever. Bitcoin. Ethereum. Hardware wallets. Seed phrases. Document what exists and where the recovery information is stored. Billions in crypto have been lost simply because nobody could access it.
11. Important Contacts. Your family may not know who helps run your life. Your accountant. Your lawyer. Your financial advisor. Your business partner. Your employer. Write down names, phone numbers, and email addresses. One page can save weeks of confusion.
12. Physical Assets. Not everything valuable exists online. Property deeds. Vehicle titles. Safe deposit boxes. Jewelry. Collectibles. Document what exists and where it can be found. The hardest assets to claim are often the ones nobody knows about.
Final Instructions. Some things can’t be handled by passwords. Who should manage your accounts? What should happen to your social profiles? What subscriptions should be canceled? What digital memories should be preserved? Write it down. Don’t leave important decisions to guesswork.
Melinda Abney Kaiser —I always advised clients to write a letter or similar document to be opened first upon their death. This would set out information the survivors need before even getting to the will. Preferences on disposal of remains, online account information, list all the bank accounts (lots of people spread CDs around to multiple banks so each is FDIC insured) and anything else the survivors will need to know straight away (including who is named as executor in the will).
If the will is stored with an attorney or pre-filed with the probate court, they need to know those specifics too. I advised them to update this frequently, more often than you would update a will. You can include specific object bequests when those objects were acquired after the will was written but before you want to shell out more money to update the will.
Some things you have to pay to update the will (additional beneficiaries or excluding a beneficiary, for instance), For the little things, put it in the letter and sign it.
Zorn — I’ll take the risk of a copyright infringement takedown order and urge those still on Twitter to follow Shah’s feed, where she offers other useful life tips.
Advice to readers: Don’t be Chi
Trish S. — I hate “Chicagoland.” And while I personally don’t use “ChiTown,” I know that a lot of people do, so I’ve resigned myself to it. I’ll just never say it.
Zorn — I’m fine with “Chicagoland” as shorthand for “Greater Chicago” or other references to our region that contain more syllables. We are now less than a month away from the 100th anniversary of what WBEZ has reported was the first known used of “Chicagoland” in print — a July 27, 1926 front-page story in the Tribune headlined “Chicagoland’s Shrines: A Tour of Discoveries.”
By positioning Chicago’s newspaper — and, by proxy, the city itself — as a cultural hub, (publisher Robert R.) McCormick hoped residents of nearby cities and towns would want to be associated with it, all under the banner of “Chicagoland.” And this in turn might lead to an increase in the Tribune’s readership. So the use of “Chicagoland” was in part a business strategy by McCormick.
Col. McCormick’s interpretation of “Chicagoland” was a big hunk of the midwest, but now it’s mostly used to refer to the more densely populated suburban areas, including portions of Northwest Indiana (Chicagoland Bears, anyone?)
As for ChiTown? I’m a hard no. Like “The Windy City” and “The City of Big Shoulders,” its use marks a person as a tourist or outsider. In The Reader, Wendy McClure argued:
“Chi-town” …starts with an untruth—the first syllable of the word Chicago does not rhyme with “shy”—stumbles over a questionable hyphen (some people opt to leave it out and just capitalize the T in the middle of word, which is just weird), and ends with a vague description: town. … Chi-town is the cilantro of nicknames.
To me “ChiTown” (or Chi-town if you prefer) is like “‘Frisco,” a nickname for San Francisco eschewed by natives, or the affected “N’Awlins” employed by visitors to New Orleans. Use them at the risk of your image.
Laurence E Siegel — I found myself so lost without EZ’s epic presence.
Zorn — This tongue-in-cheek lead-in to a series of Siegel’s observations about the news when I didn’t publish last week leads me to wonder if I should have simply posted open-threads issues so the conversation could continue.
I’ll be traveling again at the end of July and taking another week off, so the question for readers/subscribers is whether I should post bare-bones, nearly content-free issues for supporter/subscribers to talk amongst themselves about whatever horrific or amusing events transpire in my absence.
Results will be binding
:Note: I hope to address the still raging debates in the comment threads about ShotSpotter and the Monty Hall problem in upcoming issues.
12 days on the road
What I did on my summer vacation
I didn’t publish last week, as several of you were kind enough to complain about. In nearly five years of writing the Picayune Sentinel and Picayune I’ve taken only one or two other weeks off, posting through a lot of other trips and distracting dramas of life. What follows here is a diary of sorts of my nearly two weeks of adventures on the road.
June 16-19 —The annual golf trip reminds me that, at 68, I’m getting gradually worse at just about everything
Since 1998, with only a few interruptions, my regular golf foursome— now-former Tribune newsroom employees — has taken a trip to a midwest resort for some intense days on the links. This year one of our number was dealing with some health issues so my high-school/college friend Pete drove over from his home on Cape Cod to fill out the ranks.
We played 90 holes in three days at the Gull Lake resort near Kalamazoo, with the usual assortment of successes and failures. Golf is a very hard game, made much harder when you don’t practice much or play very often. I accommodated myself to this reality 11 years ago in a column (gift link) in which I wrote:
I choose to be a mediocre golfer.
I could hit straighter drives, crisper chips and truer putts. I could regularly shoot 3 or 4 over par for nine holes. But that would require professional instruction and, most important, practice — hours at the range and on and around the putting greens, turning those swing thoughts into reflexes. And I’ve chosen not to do that.
Week in and week out I’ve made the decision that I’d rather not spend the time and money to get better. The frequency with which I hit errant shots isn’t confounding, it’s inevitable.
In this light, every shot of mine that sails out of bounds, drops in the water or skitters pathetically along the grass in front of me isn’t a failure so much as it is a consequence.
And the solution remains at hand.
I could choose, next spring, to devote myself to improving my game. I could sign up with a pro, steal away on occasional evenings and weekends to hit buckets of balls, and start putting at targets in the living room to groove my stroke.
I wrote that this realization was “emotionally liberating,” which was mostly true. My serenity does still vanish after a succession of unfortunate shots, and I was ready to give up the sport entirely on our last day following one particularly disastrous par 5 on the back nine.
What I have not yet been emotionally liberated from is that the years have taken a distinct toll on the distance I can hit the ball. My swing feels exactly the same as it’s ever felt, but it’s undeniably slower — the club I used to hit for 150 yards now goes only 120 yards, for just one example of many. Golfers know why this matters and non-golfers won’t care, but it was a reminder to me of how time has become a nearly implacable foe. I now run slower, I’m mostly earthbound on the basketball court, and even my sleeping has gotten janky.
Johanna reminds me that I should be grateful at my age that I can still play 90 holes of golf in three days, run six miles without stopping and even play basketball. All true. But for a person as goal oriented and driven as I’ve always been, deterioration is hard to accept gracefully. There may be one exception, which I’ll get to in a bit.
June 19-20 — The family funeral
After our final round of golf, I drove from Kalamazoo down to Bloomington, Indiana, the destination for nearly all of our family trips when I was a kid. Both sets of grandparents lived there — my mother’s father was chairman of the Indiana University history department and my father’s father was a mathematics professor; they lived half a mile from one another — as did my mother’s brother — my Uncle Frank — and my three cousins.
Uncle Frank died on May 20 and his funeral service was held exactly a month later in the church where he’d been an altar boy.He was 96 and had been experiencing dementia, an affliction that has totally ravaged my mother, 94.
Though the Alzheimer’s Society assures me that dementia “is so common in people in their late 70s and 80s, having a parent or grandparent with Alzheimer's disease at this age does not change your risk compared to the rest of the population,” the family link still frightens me. To call advanced dementia a fate worse than death is a vast understatement.
The service for Uncle Frank was very religious. The family asked me to read Psalm 46 from the pulpit, and I resisted the urge to insert a wry remark after the line that says God “makes wars cease to the end of the earth.”
Promises promises.
As with most such rituals involving those who have lived into their 90s, it was as much a celebration of life as it was an occasion for mourning. Yes, there were a few tears — a particularly moving eulogy from one of his granddaughters — but also some laughs along with a profound sense of gratitude for all that he gave to his family and community. In that sense it was similar to the event we held earlier this year after my father died at age 94.
A highlight for me was reconnecting with my cousin Julie, who is four days younger than I am but has been in a different orbit for the last many decades. Here is a photo of the surviving cousins:
On the table of photos at the reception was a picture I’d never seen — a portrait of John Dale Barnhart Jr., a boy to whose untimely death I almost certainly owe my life.
“Johnny Junior” was born in 1919 to my grandparents, and his death in 1929 from a variety of then-untreatable childhood illnesses caused them unimaginable grief. The family story goes that they had wanted only one child, so they quickly got to work, so to speak, on replacing Johnny Junior. Frank Barnhart was born less than a year later.
My mother, born a little more than two years after that, has always believed that she was a “spare” — a hedge against the possibility that another devastating illness would again leave her parents childless.
It must have been a tough thought, but we’re all the result of a thousand random events in the past, some of them tragic.
June 20-21 — Clearing out the family home
My sister and I are slowly, methodically clearing out the home in Ann Arbor, Michigan where my mother still lives. She is alive but, as noted above, ravaged by dementia to the point she no longer recognizes me and has only a handful of words left, a poignant shout of “why?” being among them. A crew of devoted caregivers tends to her 24/7.
I took my father’s papers up to the University of Michigan where he was a physics professor from 1962 until his retirement in 2009. I suspect it was largely an act of wish-cycling. Wish-cycling is a term for putting all sort of probably useless waste into recycling bins in the futile hope that just maybe they can be recycled, and it’s my guess that those who will handle our donation at the physics department will pull out just a few items of interest and do what we didn’t have the heart to do, which is discard most of dad’s life’s work.
We also collected nearly all of his books and lugged them to Ann Arbor Public Library’s donation drop-off site. There they will be sold or tossed.
It’s astounding how many books my parents had collected over the years. Since my sister and I do most of our reading online and through audiobooks and are making efforts to cull our personal book collections, we set aside very few volumes to keep. Our hope is that most of them will find good homes and that the sale proceeds will help the library buy new books that support today’s authors and entertain today’s readers.
June 22 — A trip to the ER
I decided to get out the electric hedge trimmer and hack away at the trumpet vines and other vegetation that was starting to overwhelm the walkway leading to my mother’s front door. In my haste to clear one particularly pesky vine I reached for it with my left hand as I let the chattering clipper droop from my right hand.
The resulting two gashes in my index finger were so severe that the nurse at urgent care could not sew them up, so she sent me off to the emergency room. There, after the usual emergency room experience of moving from here to there and waiting and waiting, a doctor closed the wound with nine stitches.
Oddly, my finger didn’t hurt that much. Saying so to the triage team was likely a mistake, as everything probably would have gone faster if I’d writhed in agony.
And I probably would have been in considerably more distress had I not been wearing gloves while operating the hedge trimmer. The medical team said I was comparatively lucky, though of course I didn’t feel lucky. I realized almost instantly that I’d be unable to play at the annual Indiana Fiddlers’ Gathering that coming weekend at the Tippecanoe Battlefield near Lafayette, which was to be the last stop on my journey.
June 24-26 — The 50th high school reunion
The gruesome accident gave me a story to tell to former classmates at events connected to our 50th high school reunion. It ran Wednesday into Friday, as the organizing committee figured, correctly, that most of us would be at least semi-retired by now and free to attend midweek festivities when hotel rates would be cheaper.
Craig Brennan (from our rival Huron High School) gave a wonderful speech at the Thursday night banquet. Here’s an excerpt:
We made it through our first dates and breakups, we made it through our senior year football championships (or defeats), Homecoming parades and proms, battle of the bands, concerts and musicals performances, swim meets, tennis matches, Lacrosse battles, the smart-kid debates, and student government elections. …
We made it through our first cars, first moves, first marriages, and first families. Some of us succeeded beyond our wildest 18-year-old imaginations. Some of us struggled, and failed, and failed again, fought addictions, suffered personal tragedies or setbacks. A few of us were like rocket ships that easily soared to academic, career, and family success. …
Our bodies survived implants, cataracts, Botox, and facelifts; hair transplants, tummy tucks, new hips, and inflated lips.
And through it all, here we are. We made it, we made it through incredible ups and downs, twists and turns, personal, national and global, And we are still standing, still engaged, still here with our families, our friends and communities, and we all choose to return to the place we once called home to reconnect and to remember. …
We all made it here tonight. Enjoy your rekindled friendships. Look past the wrinkles and extra pounds, the grey hair or no hair, the half-remembered moments five minutes ago, and embrace the magic of our 18-year-old selves and celebrate!
I spent most of my spare time all week catching up at breakfast and over coffee with people I’d known well from as early as elementary school — the large group activities were a bit exhausting — and overall came away more than ever standing by what I wrote last November to an old acquaintance who was leaning against not going.
I have been to every one of our class reunions and I’ve found them successively more cleansing — old animosities, estrangements and awkwardnesses continue to fade and we start seeing/remembering each other for what we really were: hormone drenched goofballs stumbling along trying to figure our place in the world. High school accentuated differences that with time became similarities. We’re now all a bunch of graying boomers who don’t feel the need or have the energy to rise in the pecking order.
I don’t think I persuaded him, as I didn’t see him at any of the events.
I ended up having many conversations with people whom, in some cases, I’d never actually had a conversation when were in school together, and trading lots of hopeful promises to see each other again at the 60th.
Name tags like this, made from our yearbook photos, were indispensable and in some cases mortifying:
June 19-20— The fiddle fail
I was almost instantly sorry that I’d detoured to the Indiana Fiddlers’ Gathering late Friday rather than heading straight home. It’s a great event that I look forward to every year, in part because playing fiddle is maybe the one thing I am getting better at these days.
Friends from near and far sit in circles most of the day and half the night playing tunes, talking and joking. But as much as I liked seeing friends there — roughly half the cast of Songs of Good Cheer was in attendance — and hearing them play, it was depressing and painful not to be able to join in. I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me nor did I want to mope around feeling sorry for myself, so I packed up and left first thing the next morning.
The finger is healing — I’m able to type normally now and even play a few tunes just so long as I don’t press too hard on the strings. There will be other festivals, other reunions and many trips back to Ann Arbor in the coming year.
NewsWheel
Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. This week I have decided to ask readers to solve the puzzle and post the answer in the comment thread, perhaps with a link to a relevant news item. And let me know if you prefer this way of doing things.
The week’s best visual jokes
Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:
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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. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.
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I find myself vacillating between "Tempered Optimism" and "Shame" these days, depending on news and mood, but currently firmly in "Shame". I agree that the word "patriotism" has been hijacked, like so many others, and put into the service of the demagogue in chief to rile up, outrage, and divide. Another newly-loaded word that I now avoid because it carries meaning that I don't intend.
Also as an immigrant, i probably have a different relationship with the concept. Growing up in the early 80's the schools i went to and the TV I watched all told me how lucky and proud I should be to be growing up in the USSR, the bestest country ever conceived. Then my dad clued me in on a few aspects of Soviet history that really didn't warrant that attitude. Then economic hardships began. Then Gorbachev's reforms kicked in, including Glasnost - openness to reexamining history and revealing horrible tragic parts of it. You can imagine a 10-year old's confusion.
Then when I was 15 we moved to the US and I felt the convert's zeal - pride and great fortune of joining a society where hope and freedom and opportunity are abound. It was then also slowly tempered by learning the history of the country, but until Trump I was always hopeful that we were making progress and improvements.
The patriotism I felt before was like a home owner who loves and takes pride in his house. The location and design and architectural accents, and he loves to have people over to show it off, even knowing that the roof is leaking in spots and the basement needs sealing and some pain is chipping, etc, but that can all be fixed. But now it feels like the problems are overwhelming. The roof has outright holes in it, the foundation has spreading cracks, there is mold everywhere and the structure is deteriorating, and the smell is so bad I can't have anyone over for a party.
In the overall scheme of things, I am proud of the United States of America. The actions of the US government of late DO NOT make me proud. I'm proud of our legacy and our potential, but in the moment I am very disappointed.