Don't forget about Marc Fogel

Any trade with the Russians for Brittney Griner must include the imprisoned educator

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August 9, 2022

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.

News about the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate broke just as I was finishing up this issue, and it’s clearly too early to come to any solid conclusions about what it might mean. But I will say that I don’t care if MAGA nation is outraged and energized by the search — they know what they can do with their feelings. No one is above the law.

I will also say that my foot has hit the “surely Trump won’t be able to get out of this one!” banana skin too many times already for me to feel any particular elation at signs the U.S. Justice Department is really closing in this time.

Free Marc Fogel too!

Yes, Brittney Griner’s sentence of nine years in a Russian penal colony for having vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her hand luggage when she arrived at a Moscow-area airport in February is unconscionable and outrageous.

Whether the WNBA superstar had packed the contraband accidentally in haste, as she has said, or whether she was simply trying to sneak it in to use medicinally — or, hell, even recreationally — there’s no indication that she was involved in the drug trade. A fine and perhaps expulsion from the country would have been an adequate sanction for this first-time offense.

But if Griner’s sentence is unconscionable and outrageous, what adjectives are sufficient to describe the 14-year sentence a Russian judge imposed in June on Marc Hilliard Fogel for a strikingly similar offense?

Fogel, 61, who taught history courses to the children of foreign diplomats in Moscow, was arrested in August of last year for trying to enter Russia with half an ounce of marijuana and some cannabis buds hidden in his luggage, palliatives that a doctor had prescribed to treat chronic pain related to spinal surgeries. Russia does not recognize medical marijuana prescriptions so Fogel was taking a huge risk, but, again, there was no indication that he was involved in the drug trade despite the Russians’ unsupported accusation that he was intending to sell his stash to students.

Fogel’s name is rarely mentioned in stories about proposed prisoner swaps between the U.S. and Russia. One reason may be that, until recently, advocates for the suburban Pittsburgh man have kept a low profile because the higher the profile becomes of prisoners in such situations, the greater their trade value becomes for their captors.

The outcry over Griner has so increased her value that Russia is now reportedly demanding a steep price for her release: The return of Viktor Bout, a weapons trafficker known as “The Merchant of Death” who is serving a 25-year term in the medium security federal prison in downstate Marion, and Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for murder in a German prison. Paul Whelan, an American serving 16 years in a Russian prison after an espionage conviction that U.S. officials say is bogus, is said to be part of the proposed deal for Griner.

Such a trade — assuming Germany could be persuaded to go along with it — would be grotesquely, dangerously asymmetrical, even if Fogel were to be added to the list of those released. For the U.S. to swap drug users and those purportedly falsely convicted of espionage for arms traders and murderers would incentivize hostile foreign countries to in effect kidnap travelers from the U.S. in order to liberate their worst malefactors.

And it’s not like the U.S. can honestly express indignation over the incarceration of petty drug offenders.

The Biden administration is facing significant political pressure to make a lopsided deal in light of Griner’s celebrity status, though the political backlash for making such a capitulation would likely be significant as well. The chances for a like-for-like swap — an exchange of imprisoned drug offenders — already seem small and will diminish further as the clamor here grows for Griner’s return.

A recent Washington Post article, “This American teacher also sits in a Russian jail, worried nobody cares,” features the first-ever interview with Fogel’s wife:

“There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that Marc will be left behind,” Jane Fogel said. “It’s terrifying. I would hope that President Biden and especially first lady Jill Biden, who is an educator, realize the importance of including Marc in addition to Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.”

And his sister, Anne Fogel, gave an interview to PBS the following day:

Q: Do you believe that the U.S. government is right now doing everything it can to free your brother?

A: Well, no, I don't, because he has not been deemed wrongfully detained (as Griner has been, for reasons that the U.S. State Department has not explained). And that is — we need that. We need that moniker in order to move him into the potential negotiations for the swap. … We're very worried he's going to be left behind. And I worry that there will not be another opportunity like this.

Whatever deal the U.S. does or doesn’t make, failure to include Fogel in the negotiations will be scandalous.

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

In comments, on Facebook and via email I received numerous other nominations for names that have been “ruined” by popular music — and by “ruined” I mean “have become an invitation for new acquaintances to sing the relevant lyric upon introduction.”

Here are more names submitted by readers: Amy (Amie), Angie, Betty, Diane (Diana), Jackie, Jenny, Joanna, Lucy (Lucille), Mary, Peggy Sue, Renee, Rosalita, Sally, Stacy, Sylvia, Veronica and Valerie. Meanwhile folk music has wreaked havoc on Clementine, Daisy, Irene and Susanna.

I still say Gloria — by dint of the combined popularity of the songs with that title and the popularity of the name — tops the charts.

Meanwhile, my sister Karen dryly observes that when it comes to having a first name ruined by popular culture, Karens yield to no one.

Dave B. — You were close, but Roxanne — from the 1978 Police ballad, “Roxanne” is the clear winner. Biased? Why, yes, I am. This is my wife's name. Every mouth breather in the world can sing the opening lyric to that song and think he's (it's always a he, isn't it) as witty as Noel Coward. After 44 years, it gets old. Really, really old.

If Roxanne were a more common first name, it would win easily!

Randy C. — Patti Smith did a “Gloria” for the ages.

Several readers called my attention to this. Here is a YouTube of a live version in which she takes more than five minutes to build to the “Gloria” payoff. It’s worth the wait.

Lawrence W. — I adopted a time restricted eating regimen — one of the iterations of intermittent fasting that you wrote about last week — four and a half years ago: I stop eating by 6 p.m. and, generally, don’t eat again until 10 a.m. the next day. I’ve lost 20 pounds over the last seven years. TRE has helped me get used to going longer periods of time without feeling hungry. My hedonic eating drive seems to have been reduced.

I’ve been brainwashed by the “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” lobby and would find such a wait very difficult. But the “snacking after dinner is a bad idea” caucus has me persuaded.

Anna B. — My husband and I began eating a very low carbohydrate/carnivore One Meal A Day — OMAD— diet in August 2015. Since that time he has lost 66 pounds without ever going hungry. He reduced body fat rather than muscle mass — he can still perform 10 or more chin-ups and brings home respectable results from swimming, running and cycling events. To my eye he looks just as hot as when we met 40 years ago.

This is Weight-Optimization Eating —WOE. I have neither lost nor gained a single pound because I didn't need to. However I do sleep soundly at night with fewer bouts of brain fog and what I call “hangxiety” during the day. My skin conditions have disappeared and I no longer get cold sores. I now have more time to read, write, walk and sew. I am no longer as ripped as I was in my 40s. However I am 63 now and remain baffled why other grown-ups, clearly smarter than I am, have yet to figure out how simple and painless weight management can be.

I might be able to do TMAD — two meals a day — but OMAD does sound if not painful then certainly difficult. Not 10 chin-ups difficult, but still, WOE is not me.

David A. — You wrote, “Violent extremism is heavily concentrated on the right.” I guess you must have slept through the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, the weeks-long left-wing siege of the federal courthouse — which, by the way, is where citizens go to vindicate violations of their civil rights — in Portland, and the the CHAZ-CHOP secession from the Union in Seattle. … BLM riots caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and cost hundreds of lives. … Or perhaps you’re just a long-hauler COVID-19 survivor suffering from selective memory loss.

I stand by this generalization. Reader Joanie W. responded to your comment with a link to “Black Lives Matter Protesters Were Overwhelmingly Peaceful, Our Research Finds” from the Harvard/Radcliffe Institute. Regarding deaths, the study reported:

In total, at least three Black Lives Matter protesters and one other person were killed while protesting in Omaha, Austin and Kenosha, Wis. One anti-fascist protester killed a far-right group member during a confrontation in Portland, Ore.; law enforcement killed the alleged assailant several days later. … Most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters.

A Washington Post fact check put into perspective the Guardian’s overheated headline “At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020”:

The (Guardian) figure includes the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings … as well as a shooting classified as an act of “violent far-right” domestic terrorism by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …Another one of the deaths was actually at a “patriot rally,” not a BLM event. … [Three] demonstrators died when cars drove through or rammed into crowds of BLM protesters. … The list of 25 deaths also includes two California law enforcement officers killed by an alleged anti-government “boogaloo” extremist.

That said, I would agree that describing the BLM protests as “overwhelmingly peaceful” downplays the extensive and costly (up to $2 billion) property damage that occurred. Vandalism is not “violence,” as such, but it’s certainly not “peaceful” and it certainly ought to be condemned. Further, I believe that images of burning businesses and looted storefronts damaged the very cause protesters were attempting to advance.

The right is more heavily armed than the left and the litany of right wing extremists who have committed acts of murderous violence speaks for itself: Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bombing), Dylann Roof (Charleston church massacre), Eric Rudolph (Olympic Park Bombing), Robert Bowers (Tree of Life Synagogue shooting), Patrick Crusius (El Paso Walmart shooting), Robert Dear Jr. (Planned Parenthood of Colorado Springs shooting) Payton Gendron (Buffalo Supermarket shooting). And so on.

“We find that radical acts perpetrated by individuals associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent” than those perpetrated by those associated with right wing causes, concluded a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

New America’s look at the terrorist threat found:

Since 9/11 … far-right terrorism (consisting of anti-government, militia, white supremacist, and anti-abortion violence)… has killed 122 people. The United States has also seen attacks in recent years inspired by black separatist/nationalist ideology and ideological misogyny. Individuals motivated by these ideologies have killed twelve and seventeen people respectively and those with far-left views have killed one person.

That report doesn’t have a date on it — for God’s sake, think tanks, time stamp your damn white papers! — but it all leads me to conclude that my correspondent David is the one suffering from memory loss.

Laurence S. — As I write this, I am at the e xposition building at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee. There is a Republican booth and a Democratic booth. At the Republican booth, you can find tees and bumper stickers for sale with every kind of insult against Democrats. I saw one man wearing a tee that said "F##k Joe and the hoe." At the Democratic booth there were items highlighting liberal causes, but nothing attacking conservatives. This can be taken two ways. Some might say Democrats are wimps, afraid to get tough. I see it as conservatives needing to look up the meaning of the words "puberty," "maturity,"and "adulthood."

I’m no longer particularly concerned with civility when it comes to politics, given that voters rarely if ever seem to reward it, and am mainly concerned with what sorts of messages succeed in motivating supporters to vote. That said, I doubt that calling VP Kamala Harris a “hoe” is effective in attracting persuadable voters or inspiring indolent voters.

Rick L. — Dude! I just listened to the August 3 “Mincing Rascals” podcast and heard your reference near the end to the Shoot the Bull 3-on-3 basketball tournament that was held long ago in Grant Park. I can’t believe how you threw me under the bus by downplaying your team’s incredible upset win over my heavily favored Thunder Chickens squad way back in the Roaring 1990s, when men were men! You said something to the effect that your team won one year, but in some minor, inconsequential division. Geez, couldn’t you have made it sound a little bit better than that? Play it up a little! Glory Days, man! At our ages it’s not only allowed, but it’s expected and perhaps even encouraged!

I keep waiting for ESPN to do a "30 for 30" on that inspiring victory by "Hope Springs Eternal," a team captained by dead-eye three-point shooter David Axelrod. I didn't mean to downplay our humiliation of the Thunder Chickens nor did I want to make it sound as though we were the best team among the more than 2,000 four-player teams in that tournament, teams that are broken up into scores of brackets, each one of which had a champion. 

I miss that event, which was held from 1989 until 2000 and raised money for the Illinois Special Olympics and other worthy causes. The Bulls pulled the plug on it because, the team said, it wanted to focus their efforts on starting a WNBA team in Chicago and Shoot The Bull was “a time-consuming project that would need the same staff we've got working on the WNBA project," a team spokesman said.

The WNBA Chicago Sky has now been playing here since 2006. Just sayin’.

One of my favorite parts of Shoot the Bull was always the team names — My column headlined “When teams go 3-on3, it’s a pun fight at the name corral” featured some of the best.

Tom G. — Stop writing about John Kass. No one cares about that loser.

It’s objectively false that “no one cares” or even “just a few people care” about my former colleague John Kass. He was the Tribune’s lead columnist for nearly 24 years, has more than 54 thousand Twitter followers (two and half times the number I do) and operates a website that, to judge by the voluminous comment traffic, has an impressive number of regular visitors. Items about him regularly get more clicks than any other links at the Chicago Public Square local news curation site.

I reject the idea that ignoring someone with a significant platform/audience is a good way to marginalize him, and that challenging him publicly on the lies he is promulgating in various media about his former colleagues at the Tribune only raises his profile. When lies go unchallenged they gain such a foothold that many assume them to be true. Nevertheless, as I noted last week, people I respect a great deal have advised me to give it a rest, that my return fire is too inside or too repetitive — "boring," as one friend put it — to be worth posting.

So, I put the question on Facebook — where my “friend” group is probably similar to the Picayune Sentinel readership, to ask which team are you on? "You go!" or "Let it go!"

Nearly 20 respondents — including some former colleagues and real life friends — urged me to let it go. “Stick to earwax” one wrote. “You made your point and can find fresh things to write about,” wrote another. “Emphatically, let it go!” said a third.

But more than 10 times that many, 204 by my rough count, were on team “You go!” Those also included former colleagues and real-life friends. I won’t quote them here, but all their comments are in the Facebook thread, and most don’t seem to find the back and forth the least bit boring.

My decision: I will post rebuttals or reminders about the real story in the Sentinel only when Kass advances again his false narrative. So as not to bore those who are no longer interested, I’ll mostly stick to linking to what I’ve already written, then I’ll get right back to the earwax coverage.

Jim F. — I find it so wonderfully delicious that for years you censored and blocked people who made comments critical of your writings, or who simply didn't passionately heap praise upon you; and how you further cherry-picked only positive Zorn sycophants' comments for your blogs, columns, and other Zorn-centric noise. I recall how you so smugly informed me once that you made the determination to block any further comments or emails from me because they "violated your predetermined standards of intellectual discourse." In reality, my comments didn't blindly praise your pompous, pedantic and dogmatic arrogance. And now, after years of railing on the capitalistic brand of journalism, you are fully out there promoting your money-making publication and forcing people to pay in order to praise you in their commentary! 

I “blocked” people or deleted comments when they added nothing but bile to the conversation, but if you’d like to review the comments area of my old blog, Change of Subject, you’ll find plenty of critical commentary and dissent. I enjoy productive back and forth, but not seething, rash name-calling unmoored from the facts. I don’t have any old emails from you to quote from, unfortunately, but this one serves as a decent enough example. The words you put into quote marks “violated your predetermined standards of intellectual discourse” don’t sound like me, especially since I rarely refer to myself in the second person, but perhaps I did write something to that effect since the Tribune frowned on me telling even the most abusive letter writers what I really thought of them. Family newspaper standards and all. Now I operate under no such constraints.

I’ve never railed about “the capitalistic brand of journalism,” and the reason I reserve the comments area of the Picayune Sentinel for paying customers is that it has proven to be a pretty good way of keeping out the intemperate trolls. Quite a few Substacks do this, and many publications have simply eliminated comments altogether because so many people don’t know how to have a civil exchange of contrasting opinions. If you were a paying subscriber to my proudly capitalistic enterprise, you’d see that those with opposing views post regularly, and that they often have their say here in the Tuesday Zmail offering as well.

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:

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

“Hey Wendy. Oh, not much, just dropping a deuce in the McDonald’s parking lot. And you?”

KattsDogma @KattsDogma

Photographer: Ok. You two hold hands, & u, in the back, hold a gun to that guy's head. Nice. I'll add blush in post.

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!

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