Can we stand Pat?

"Wheel of Fortune" host Pat Sajak is a right-wing troll. Meh.

To read this issue in your browser, click on the headline above.

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.

Pat Sajak, would you like to buy a clue?

“Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak is taking a pounding on social media for posing recently for a photograph with deranged Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and Right Side Broadcasting Network troll Brian Glenn, pictured here with the My Pillow guy.

I’m not sure why the political inclinations of the host of a glorified version of hangman matter, especially to those of us who don’t watch. And Sajak has long been known crank/provocateur:

As far back as 2014 Vice collected these scraps of drollery from the same account:

• Even though I told him it was settled folklore, my young nephew remains a Tooth Fairy denier. (Those kids today!)

• My interest in Al Gore's pronouncements could fit into a gnat's navel & still leave room for a Liberal's sense of humor.

• Prediction: Next big 'cause du jour' will be Plants Rights. No joke! (Can see posters now: Ficus have feelings, too!)

I wish I were a regular viewer so I could indignantly renounce him and commence a boycott, but all I can do is shrug.

Defining ‘bullying’ downward

Staff writer Helen Lewis at the Atlantic recently reached out to Chaédria LaBouvier with this message:

Dear Chaédria, I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic and I'm writing about US museums and the racial reckoning of 2020. I plan to discuss your experience at the Guggenheim. Might we talk? I’m on hlewis@theatlantic.com. Best wishes, Helen.

LaBouvier was the first Black curator of an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and reported having had a bad experience. She posted a screen shot of Lewis’ message on Twitter and summarized it as Lewis “literally demanding that I speak to her.” She added that the approach was “bullying/presumptive/unethical/unprofessional/ arrogant and dangerously wrong. Wrong b/c not only is a journalist never supposed to approach a subject in this manner, she is missing key & essential receipts that she will (never) get.”

She then sent an email to Lewis and her editor, the salient paragraph of which began, “Fuck you. I am so tired of scavenging journalists attempting to speak for me, or depict me.”

Lewis replied with an email that said, in part:

I understand that you've decided not to speak with me for my story, but I hope you might reconsider. I believe your perspective is very important for me and for our readers to understand what happened at the Guggenheim. I also want to be sure you know that I plan to quote parts of our correspondence so far. I'm telling you this because you mentioned over Instagram that your message to me was “not a quote or response," but we haven't agreed to any such conditions are ground rules. I'd be grateful for your time to discuss this further. It's very important to me that I ensure your views are properly and fully reflected in this story.

LaBouvier responded with another “Fuck you” email that accused Lewis of bullying her, of being incapable of telling the story “with the reporting, truth and consideration that it deserves” and added “There is a story to be told, but it’s not by you.”

There is clearly a lot of high emotion in this story and grievances that run deep. LaBouvier’s entire thread begins here and includes the accusation that “the experience creating at the Guggenheim was w/o question the most racist experience of my entire life.” Wikipedia has more on that.

I couldn’t begin to referee that claim or the claims about Lewis’ ability to write an accurate article that includes it, but I can referee the claim that her outreach was a demand or that it smacked of bullying.

Asking for interviews is something that journalists do all the time. And it’s very common, when covering a controversy, to say something along the lines of “I’m telling this story and I’d like to hear your side of it.”

When LaBouvier wrote that a “journalist (is) never supposed to approach a subject in this manner,” she was totally wrong.

Of course it’s also very common — and perfectly acceptable — for someone to turn down an interview request or offer a curt “no comment” or “no thank you.” For whatever reason!

And it’s totally fair for Lewis to quote LaBouvier’s splenetic response which, to my mind, undermines confidence in her judgment on other matters.

Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited — along with my responses

Some of these messages are in reference to items in last week’s issues of the Picayune Sentinel.

Ken B. —The title alderman means “old man”, connoting some wisdom that comes with age, perhaps. I like an alternative title “viceroy”.

The language-court jury found in favor of “alder” as the favored way of referring to a member of the Chicago City Council. The second most popular option was the dreaded (to me) “alderperson,” though, as my fellow Mincing Rascal Heather Cherone of WTTW-Ch. 11 pointed out, a new state law last summer formally changed “all statutory references of alderman and aldermen to alderperson and alderpersons (and) all statutory references of congressman to congressperson.” That was right around the time I was leaving the Tribune, otherwise I would have thrown 57 fits about it.

Marc M. — I prefer “prefelon” as a title for a member of the Chicago City Council

Joe K. — Regarding police having to call off chases when perpetrators reached the expressway, wouldn’t drones be a good option for following fleeing suspects?

I have high hopes for drone technology in law enforcement and I hope that our agencies in Illinois invest heavily in it. High-speed chases are very dangerous and the limits on them very sensible, but it’s also dangerous to have a widely known policy that gives lawbreakers the confidence that they don’t have to stop for police.

Here’s a scenario offered by the Police1 site:

A vehicle just fled a traffic stop. The driver, aware his driver’s license is suspended, knows the agency has a strict no-chase policy and, if he runs, no one will chase him.

The driver is correct. The officer turns off his vehicle’s emergency lights and slows down, terminating the pursuit.

A short distance away the driver stops at a traffic light after no longer seeing any law enforcement in the vicinity, and attempts to merge back into normal traffic. Suddenly, several patrol vehicles arrive and block the vehicle in before it can move through the intersection. The driver is taken into custody without any idea how the police followed him.

Over a half mile away, a drone is recovered by one of the agency’s UAS pilots. The drone had been launched just after the driver fled, and the pilot was able to locate the vehicle in the area based on a description provided by the initiating officer. The drone followed the vehicle – almost silent at an altitude of 300 feet above the ground – while the pilot relayed vehicle position reports to ground-based units. The trap was set and, when the opportunity came, it was sprung.

Training and equipment costs would be high and regulatory hurdles formidable, but I can imagine drones being used to bust up carjacking and catalytic converter theft rings in ways that conventional law enforcement methods have not been able to, even to the point of surreptitiously following a vehicle to a locus of criminal operations.

Bill L. — I write this as the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II plays on the TV next to me. And I have to wonder: What are the dignitaries really thinking as they go through all that folderol? I’m wondering if you also watched and what your impressions were.

I did not watch. I had no relationship with the Queen, even a one-sided one, and, despite having watched every season so far of “The Crown” on Netflix, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about her either way. And to me, funerals are always about the living — a gathering to support the survivors in their grief, to underscore for them the esteem in which you held the deceased and, depending on the circumstances, to have a bittersweet celebration of the life that has ended .

It’s bad form and presumptuous to critique how others grieve and otherwise process their losses, but my guess is that at least a few of the dignitaries in attendance found all the ritual and pomp somewhat tedious and unnecessary. Elizabeth made it to 96 and was vertical until her very last days. That’s wonderful. I would of course feign sorrow were I compelled to don funeral raiments and put in an appearance — it’s what you do! — but I’d be checking my watch frequently.

Laurence S. —Regarding your “News & Views” item about how a homeless encampment has taken over Chicago’s Touhy Park (7348 N. Paulina St.) and made it impossible for the residents of the area to use the park, I agree that the general public should have use of the park and feel safe doing it. But no one ever seems to have a good solution for where to place those without access to permanent housing..There aren't enough shelter beds in the city even if you could get the homeless to use them, and many are closed during the day.

Citizens will pay one way or another whether it be for shelter space, for treatment programs, for transition programs or for crime prevention.

I’ve spent time with the homeless. Many of them regret poor choices they have made. At the same time, many had abusive upbringing which gave them little chance at success. Some have mental health and substance abuse issues. Others have developmental deficiencies. They often find it hard to get and keep jobs.

First, we need to accept that more help is needed. Otherwise we won't start to do what is needed. But as long as people believe the homeless are the cause of their own problems and should just go away, little will be done. Do I even need to entire the near total failure of the city in dealing with issues in minority communities? We will have a nice new presidential library on space supposed to be devoted to free public use. Who is dealing with the social issues in that community?

I feel bad that some residents on the Northwest Side have lost use of their park. But where are those without housing supposed to go?

Call me a socialist, but I think everyone should have a clean, safe, climate controlled indoor space to sleep as well as enough food to eat and access to basic health care, which obviously includes mental health care. I believe human decency demands it and that a nation as rich as ours can afford it and can absorb the certainty that some people will freeload off taxpayers.

We should build out enough shelter space that it’s thinkable to enforce all our curfew and vagrancy laws and clear out these encampments.

I spent many months reporting on those without housing back in the early 1980s, and I came to understand the sobering complexity of the problem and the variety of ways that people ended up losing their homes. Some of them clearly could become productive and self-sustaining members of society if given a proper base of operations and other rudimentary support.

Others will always be lost and unsalvageable. Allowing them to live little better than animals helps no one.

Michael C. —Thomas DeVore, the Republican candidate for attorney general in Illinois, is a bully. You reported last week how, five years ago, he used the term “window lickers” to refer on Facebook to refer to “special” children with intellectual challenges. My son is a 34 year old man with Down syndrome. I find it telling that not only did this guy think those thoughts, but he also he felt so entitled that he wrote them down and shared them with the world. I don’t care how long ago it was. Respectful adults with a moral compass don’t use language like that, and based on the excuses and deflections he has since employed he remains a complete dickhead.

By “dickhead” of course you mean nothing particularly harsh. You simply mean a person who is “irritating, unruly, mean (and) disrespectful,” the definition that DeVore offered for “window lickers” when challenged on his deployment of that slur. You don’t mean that he is a comprehensively awful person of whom the Republican Party of Illinois should be deeply ashamed, because “dickhead” is not an offensive term. Right?

Wendy C. — Today's preferred term for students with developmental disabilities is diverse learners; we dropped "special" a few years ago.

Soon ,“diverse learners” will become tainted and we’ll have to change terms again, as another commenter complained. I actually don’t mind. Trying to keep up is the least any of us can do to show respect and caring to those who have struggles and challenges we can barely imagine.

Bruce R. — I had seen the recent coverage of the fake newspapers being put out in advance of the election under the auspices of Republican political consultant Dan Proft, then I received one in my mailbox yesterday. I was appalled by the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric as well as the high school sports features clearly intended to make the publications look like actual newspapers. I would definitely be interested in your take on this.

I find them repellently brilliant. By printing and mailing out some 30 such titles as “Chicago City Wire,” “DuPage Policy Journal,” “South Cook News” and “The McHenry Times,” Proft and his team of propagandists are exploiting the decline in the newspaper industry by seeming to fill the gaps with newspaperish publications that flog a particular political point of view.

Last month in the Washington Post, op-ed contributor Ryan Zickgraf wrote:

Ten years ago, I coined the term “pink-slime journalism” to describe the sneaky way companies … exploit Americans’ lingering trust in local newspapers to peddle an inferior product. The term is a reference to the controversial paste-like meat byproduct that was, according to reports at the time, supposedly being added to ground beef on supermarket shelves without a label. If the yellow journalism of the 19th century can be defined by the sensationalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, pink slime is the opposite. It wants to quietly smuggle low-quality pastel goo from a machine into your regular media diet.

The thinking clearly goes that those who throw away standard political mailers may be inclined to give a second or third look to a free “newspaper” and absorb the unsubtle political message. The fact that most recipients either don’t subscribe or don’t have access to a conventionally trustworthy area newspaper anymore makes them ripe targets for slanted, misleading or downright false “journalism.”

Rather than complain about it — which does little good and serves mostly to publicize the effort — the left should flood mailboxes with newspapers of their own.

Jim F. — I’ve tried several times to unsubscribe to this cheap blog. 

I’m sorry you’re having difficulty! At the bottom of each issue you will find the following:

If you’re clicking on that “unsubscribe” link and still getting the newsletter, let me know and I’ll escalate the problem to with Substack’s tech support team. By the way, I prefer “bargain” to “cheap” — Thursday’s main issues are totally free — and “publication” to “blog,” but I don’t want to quibble over terminology. My subscriber stats show that you’ve opened The Picayune Sentinel 211 times, which indicates either a high level of interest or an extreme level of frustration as you fail over and over to cancel your subscription. Either way, sir, you have me intrigued and I trust you can resolve this issue on your own.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:

MF FairyPrincessSmoo @Smooheed

When you can’t bear the thought that she’s gone

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

“Sorry I’m late, guys. The sitter called in sick.”

andi zeisler @andizeisler

Smartfood has HAD IT with your bullshit complaints

Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

Thank you for supporting the Picayune Sentinel. To help this publication grow, please consider spreading the word to friends, family, associates, neighbors and agreeable strangers.

.