Foxx, Smollett find it hard to say 'I'm sorry,' evidently

Hoaxster and his would-be liberator double down rather than apologize

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3-17-2022 (issue No. 27)

Jussie Smollett can restore his name and reputation only by seeking forgiveness and allowing time’s eraser to do its work.

A reversal of the actor’s conviction on appeal — the prospect of which sprung him at least temporarily from Cook County Jail Wednesday after he spent less than a week behind bars — won’t vindicate him in the court of public opinion.

If, down the line, his conviction is overturned and the case against him dismissed, most of us will remain convinced that he’s a narcissistic charlatan, a bad actor in every way.

For good reason! The lie Smollett told police, the public and then jurors — that he was the victim of a racist, homophobic attack three years ago in the Streeterville neighborhood — was so clumsy and transparent that no reversal on a technicality can ever transform it into the truth.

His endgame strategy before last week’s sentencing hearing ought to have been this: Come clean and apologize, perhaps while blaming drug use, stress or an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment. Hope that an expression of contrition moves the judge to issue a sentence of probation. Then, humbly, take the first steps down the road to professional rehabilitation.

Instead he chose to remain silent when given the chance to address trial Judge James Linn during the formal part of the sentencing. So Linn gave him a scolding for the ages on live video.

“You wanted to make yourself more famous,” Linn said. “And for a while it worked. The lights were on you. You were actually throwing a national pity party for yourself.”

The judge also ripped Smollett for doubling down on his lies at trial, when he took the witness stand in “the capper of all cappers” and lied to the jury “for hours upon hours.” (Tribune)

And after Linn sentenced him to an effective jail term of 75 days, Smollett stood defiantly before being led to the lockup and shouted, “If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of Black Americans in this country for 400 years and the fears of the LGBTQ community.”

To which Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington along with me and millions of other Americans said, in effect, “Yep.” Washington wrote:

Your fake crime brought real peril to Black and LGBTQ people who live with real threats every day. You degraded and undermined justice for the countless real victims who have been lynched, raped, spat upon, profiled, name-called, unjustly incarcerated, demeaned and discriminated against in those 400 years. That is the real crime.

I wasn’t surprised that Smollett doubled down by laying a ludicrous claim to martyrdom. He’s misplayed his cards at every turn along the way and is either getting terrible advice or not listening to good advice.

I also wasn’t surprised that Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx continued to show so little understanding of why this case has seemed so important to so many. She has missed very few opportunities in the last three years to dissemble, deflect, deny and otherwise dither when it comes to explaining why her office acted as it did and eroded confidence in the working of her office.

In a Sun-Times op-ed that posted just after the sentencing, Foxx called the prosecution of Smollett “damaging, costly, and disingenuous” and wrote that “the mob was relentless, organized and effective” in forcing a reopening of the case after she dropped it with little explanation three years ago.

Just because we do not like the outcome should not mean we bully prosecutors and circumvent the judicial process to get it changed. Smollett was indicted, tried and convicted by a kangaroo prosecution in a matter of months. Meanwhile, the families of more than 50 Black women murdered in Chicago over the last 20 years await justice.

She wrote that the special prosecution was a part of an effort to “attack and marginalize anyone fighting to create a more just system, one that recognizes the rule of law.”

And she was no more gracious in an interview that evening with the Tribune, griping that Smollett’s sentence “doesn’t feel like accountability to me. (It) feels like revenge.”

In a city plagued with “unrelenting violence,” Foxx said, it doesn’t seem right that so much attention and resources were devoted to Smollett’s case. … Ultimately, Foxx said she was saddened that the Smollett matter “cast a pall over the office as a whole. … I want to put this case behind us.”

To put this case behind her — behind all of us — Foxx, too, needs to come clean and apologize. She needs to show some genuine contrition for the lapse in judgment that would have permitted Smollett to thumb his nose at the criminal justice system and then for falsely telling the public that her office routinely dismisses similar nonviolent crimes all the time.

In fact, in special prosecutor Dan Webb’s 59-page report on how the case was bungled, he wrote:

During their interviews with the Office of the Special Prosecutor, (Foxx’s then-First Assistant Joseph) Magats, and (current First Assistant Risa) Lanier both were asked what, if any, similar precedent they had in mind or relied upon when resolving the initial Smollett case. Neither identified any specific precedent on which they had relied.

How about that? Lesser known defendants aren’t allowed to deny credible charges against them and then get a free pass that allows them to piously proclaim their innocence.

The circus of misplaced indignation and argle-bargle we saw last week was the culmination of three years of stubbornness and rotten decisions by two people now yoked together forever in local history’s rogues’ gallery.

Last week’s winning tweet

I’m unsure who first came up with this joke, which is an updated version of a joke where the punchline was “I’m a typo,” but it did very well with voters. Once again, the darkest tweet — I took Werner Herzog’s “Which Golden Girl Are You?” quiz, and it turns out I’m an amalgam of the darkest aspects of each woman, distilling out only humankind’s disgust with itself and its open embrace of the grave to come -- @batkaren — did the worst.

Meanwhile, I invite you to participate in Tweet Madness, the bracket tournament that pits the winning tweets from the last 64 weeks against one another with the goal of identifying a 2021-22 champion. As @rickaaron quipped, “The winning tweet gets to cut down the internet.”

I seeded the tweets by the percentage of votes they received. Voting in the round of 64 began Monday morning and closed early Wednesday. We’re now down to the round of 32 (see the first round results here), and your vote will be important!

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.

State’s Attorney Kim Foxx finally exonerates the officer who shot Adam Toledo nearly one year ago

No question that it’s a straight-up tragedy when a 13-year-old is shot and killed under any circumstances. In the case of Adam Toledo, who was slain at 2:38 a.m. on March 29 of last year by Chicago police Officer Eric Stillman at the conclusion of a foot chase down a Little Village alley, a lot had to have gone wrong to put someone so young into such a perilous situation.

But it was facile and unfair to immediately brand the tragedy a “murder” and an example of racist law enforcement and trigger-happy cops. When I wrote a bluntly worded column a little more than a week later making just that point and suggesting that activists who had taken to the streets to protest the killing should demand answers but not bellow conclusions, I found myself at the bottom of a social media dogpile. (Read all about that experience and the related fallout in the text of a speech I delivered last fall.)

Shortly after my column ran, another columnist at the Tribune wrote that he didn’t “care a lick what happened before the officer shot” Toledo because “this isn’t a ‘both sides’ issue. … There is only one side here.”

As emotionally satisfying as such a thought might be, of course everything depends on what happened in the seconds before Stillman fired. And here a description of those moments in the memorandum issued Tuesday by Foxx’ office that laid out findings that were reviewed and supported by the Office of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor:

Officer Stillman saw the handgun in Toledo’s right hand and shouted for Toledo to drop it. Before dropping the weapon, Toledo began turning his body toward Officer Stillman with his left hand raised up in front of his body and his right hand lowered to his side behind the wooden fence post. Officer Stillman saw the weapon in Toledo’s right hand and fired one round which struck Toledo as he completed his turn and raised his right hand which no longer held the firearm. The timing of these actions was less than one second. …

The bullet trajectory was left to right indicating that Toledo was not “squared off” facing Officer Stillman at the time Toledo was shot. Rather, it indicates that Toledo was still turning his body toward the officer at the time he was struck by the bullet.

Notably, there is no evidence to prove that Officer Stillman acted with criminal intent. ... The evidence shows that Officer Stillman reasonably used deadly force in defense of himself. …Under the current case law, the trier of fact could reasonably conclude that the evidence demonstrates that Officer Stillman reasonably believed himself to be in apparent danger of losing his life or suffering great bodily injury.

“The timing of these actions was within one second,” Foxx said in a news conference at which she explained why no charges would be filed against Stillman or Officer Evan Solano, who shot and killed a fleeing Anthony Alvarez, 22, several days after the killing of Adam Toledo. “To be precise, it was estimated to be 838 milliseconds.”

The shooting was unnecessary, in other words. Stillman made a terrible split-second decision that had a horrifying outcome, but it was an honest mistake, understandable, justifiable, noncriminal. Foxx deserves credit for making the right decision knowing that it would provoke anger and protests, though I have no idea why it took her office nearly a year to sort out the facts.

I also have no idea why child endangerment charges were dropped against Ruben Romano, Toledo’s 21-year-old companion that night. From the Tribune:

Roman allegedly was captured on video firing the gunshots that brought officers to the area, authorities have said. He fired off shots at the corner of 24th Street and Sawyer Avenue, and he fled with Toledo shortly afterward, with officers pursuing them into an alley, according to Cook County prosecutors.

Roman was arrested first, after apparently having handed the gun to Toledo. Toledo kept running, video of the shooting shows, pursued by Stillman. … However, when Roman was formally indicted by a grand jury, child endangerment charges were not included — meaning Roman’s charges are no longer tied to Toledo’s death. He is awaiting trial; his next court date is scheduled for later this month.

Foxx said Tuesday that her office ultimately determined the evidence did not support bringing child-endangerment charges against Roman.

“Essentially, the actions of Mr. Roman were not the reasons for Adam Toledo’s death,” she said.

Essentially, that’s preposterous. If lugging a kid around in the middle of the night while you fire your gun and then handing that gun off to the kid when the police arrive on the scene isn’t legal child endangerment — knowingly placing a person under 18 “in circumstances that endanger the child's life or health” — I would sure like to know what is.

The shooting deaths of Toledo and Alvarez prompted the Chicago Police Department to begin to revise its policy on foot pursuits, making such chases now permissible only when there is "probable cause for an arrest or it is believed an individual has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime."

Arguably, though, a person running away from police carrying a gun that’s apparently just been illegally fired, as Toledo was, should be apprehended if possible and public safety would not be served by an oh-well-let-’em-go policy in such a circumstance.

Should Stillman have waited a beat longer just to be sure Toledo still had the gun in his hand before pulling the trigger? Obviously yes in this instance. But in slightly different circumstances, such hesitation could cost an officer his or her life.

Should Stillman have shot to wound rather than to kill? Shooting to wound is not a thing. Police officers are trained to use deadly force only in very urgent circumstances, and cinematic fantasies of shooting a gun out of the hand of an evildoer notwithstanding, it’s very difficult to shoot merely to wound someone, and a wounded person with a gun is still a mortal threat.

Toledo’s parents have filed a wrongful-death suit against the city saying Stillman’s decision to fire was unjustified and excessive, so there may be another beat to this awful story.

The Tribune reported that Stillman "has not been stripped of his police powers and remains on full duty.” But an investigation of the shooting by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) remains open.

News & Views

News: Chicago’s Daniel Boone School seeks a new name because he’s a “historically egregious figure.”

View: Fine. This seems like an easy one. The Tribune story notes:

No one seems to know why the school at Washtenaw Avenue and Pratt Boulevard is named for Boone, a folk hero who is recognized for guiding settlers into Kentucky, but not for any meaningful ties to Chicago. A 1965 Chicago Tribune series that explored the namesakes of Chicago schools noted that “Boone never came as far north as Chicago in his travels.”

There are plenty of accomplished, notable deserving people with important connections to Chicago whose names are a better fit for a local public school

Kentucky Monthly notes: “The tax rolls for 1787 indicate that Daniel owned seven slaves.” But the question of whether and how to honor notable figures of history who enslaved people remains tricky. Wikipedia maintains a list of such offenders, which does not include Boone but does include U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant.

The absolutist position — that these men and many other former slaveholders are by definition “historically egregious” and deserving only of obloquy — would require a lot of renaming of streets and parks in Chicago alone.

News: U.S. Senate unanimously approves year-round daylight saving time.

View: Since I no longer have children who will have to travel to school in the dark in the dead of winter, I’m more than fine with this proposed change, which would keep it lighter later in the afternoon and well into the evening during the summer.

I don’t mind the current system, especially since most of the time-keeping devices I rely on change automatically twice a year, but I would prefer just setting the clocks and leaving them, and have a slight preference for daylight saving. Vox argues for consistency:

Daylight saving time in the US started as an energy conservation trick during World War I and became a national standard in the 1960s. The idea is that in the summer months, we shift the number of daylight hours we get into the evening. So if the sun sets at 8 pm instead of 7 pm, we’d presumably spend less time with the lights on in our homes at night, saving electricity.

It also means that you’re less likely to sleep through daylight hours in the morning since those are shifted an hour later too. Hence “saving” daylight hours for the most productive time of the day.

But this premise never seemed to pan out. The presumed electricity savings of taking advantage of more daylight in the evening turns out to be unclear or nonexistent.

Changing the clocks does seem to have mildly deleterious health consequences, with increases in car accidents, workplace injuries and heart attacks right after we set the clocks ahead in the spring.

The Tribune Editorial Board makes the case for both standard and daylight time, then concludes:

Let’s agree right now to get rid of the changing of the clocks, a disruptive ritual that has been proven to cause accidents, create stress over missed appointments and lead to all kinds of domestic panic. In the digital era, added traumas come from not knowing which clocks automatically adjust and which stay rooted to the past in their timekeeping.

One thing picking one over the other will deprive us of, however, is the diverting wrangle over this issue twice a year.

News: Gannett to close West Milwaukee printing plant. The Journal Sentinel and 10 other Wisconsin papers will be printed in Peoria.

View: Wausau, home of Wisconsin’s northernmost Gannett-owned paper, is more than a five-hour drive from Peoria. The news in the home-delivered Wausau Daily Herald will be growing mold by the time it hits the stoop, and getting that newspaper into the hands of subscribers will burn a lot of fossil fuel. Rendering ink-on-paper journalism less vital in order to save money seems like part of a vicious downward spiral.

News: The fight over Chicago’s ward remap is moving closer to a referendum as the City Council remains unable to settle the dispute between maps proposed by the Black and Latino caucuses.

View: According to the 2020 census, there are 819,518 Hispanics in Chicago, 801,195 African Americans, 192,586 Asian Americans and 863,622 whites, so it seems obvious to me that Hispanics deserve at least equal representation with Blacks on the council. But, as the Sun-Times reported:

The map drafted for the Rules Committee and the Black Caucus includes 14 majority-Hispanic wards and preserves 17 African-American wards, including one with a Black plurality. Both maps would turn the 11th Ward … into Chicago’s first ward with a majority of Asian-Americans.

The Latino Caucus has been pushing unsuccessfully for just 15 majority-Hispanic wards. Why this isn’t universally acknowledged as more than fair I can’t imagine.

News: Student government at Northwestern University approves a policy that will close some formerly public meetings to the media so “that students can speak and have the freedom to dissent on issues without having this fear that what they say will be blown out of proportion and they will be publicly criticized.”

View: There goes the argument that students aren’t self-censoring on campus. The Daily Northwestern reports that two-thirds of the elected members of Associated Student Government can now either vote “to make a meeting ‘private,’ meaning nothing said can be reported” or close a meeting altogether but then “provide minutes to journalists for closed meetings, withholding the personal information of speakers.”

The newly revised ASG code of ethics “highly encourages” journalists to ask for permission before quoting by name those who speak at meetings.

The article doesn’t say what sort of viewpoints the student senators seek to protect by making their meetings a safe space, but it underscores the notion that campuses can be hostile to the expression of viewpoints of all sorts.

Land of Linkin’

• In the “wish I’d thought of that!” file: “Tucker Carlson mocked on Twitter as ‘TuckyoRose after Kremlin calls him ‘essential,” in Salon notes that this nickname for Vladimir Putin’s favorite TV pundit “is a take-off of Tokyo Rose, the name given to World War II women delivering pro-Japanese propaganda in English to allied soldiers in the South Pacific.” The article quotes a tweet of advice by Alexander Vindman: “Live your life in such a way that the Russian government and state TV apparatus doesn’t think you’re an ally.”

• Click and play: Ten solid hours of Chopin nocturnes on YouTube. I’ve been using this as background music for working so I can’t tell you if or how often the nocturnes repeat.

• “Saturday Night Live” cast member Bowen Yang starred in yet another brilliant, daffy skit over the weekend: “Don’t Stop Believin’ (Marching Band)” is an instant classic. Is it funnier than Yang’s appearance on the Weekend Update segment as the iceberg that sank the Titanic? Debatable.

• The Chicago Reader tells the story behind Charlie Meyerson’s Chicago Public Square in the article naming it “Best free daily roundup in your inbox.”

• Axios reports that Associated Press deputy Washington bureau chief and former New York Times and Chicago Tribune editor/reporter Michael Tackett has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to write “The Price of Power," a biography of U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Tackett, my first roommate when I moved to Chicago, “has been granted extensive interviews with McConnell and access to his vast archive,” according to Axios.

• In last week’s Picayune Sentinel, I wondered about the name of Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who was quoted in The Atlantic. It turns out The New York Times had the same question more than 20 years ago and interviewed her when she was a teenager: ''My mom is Wrigley and my dad is Field,” she said. “They named me Elizabeth Field. They thought if I was named Wrigley-Field I'd be teased a lot. When I was in first grade (and living in Los Angeles), I decided that would be a mistake. I wanted to have both my parents' names because I thought that would be fair, but I also thought it would be cool to have the name Wrigley-Field.”

• The New York Times reviews the new, budget-model $430 iPhone and concludes, “The $700-plus iPhones are better, but not 60 percent better.”

• Neil Steinberg’s column on Russia’s inept tank warfare is typically sharp and epigrammatic: “Without fuel, a tank is just a cannon with aspirations. And even with fuel, they’re often merely big rolling funeral pyres. War offers a chaos of detail.”

• 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.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Mondays 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. Monday’s segment is posted here.

Gary H. — How can I send a small donation to help keep the Picayune Sentinel going?

I get this question from time to time from readers who’d like to throw a little something into the tip jar but aren’t joiners. Which I totally understand. Unfortunately, the Substack platform allows only monthly and yearly membership options, and they set a floor on prices -- mine's the lowest. So the best way to make a small donation, which I really do appreciate and helps keep this independent project going, is to sign up/upgrade to a $5 monthly subscription and then cancel it when you reach a certain donation level by going here. 

While you’re a supporter you’ll get access to the lively comment threads and delivery of the Tuesday bonus issue.

I wish there were a better option because you're not the first person to ask about this. Again, thanks.

Mary Schmich: Redefining adventure

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. Here is this week’s offering:

About a year into the pandemic I wrote a column asking the question: Who’s the person you worry about most right now?

For some people, it was a parent or grandparent. For others, it was a child or a spouse. For me, it was my sister Gina.

I’ve written about Gina periodically through the years (she’s aware and OK with it). She’s the youngest of my seven siblings and always lived with our mother. After Mama died, Gina continued to live in the house they’d shared.

She’s the first person to say she’s surprised at how well she’s done living alone, and she has done well, despite her struggles. But when the pandemic came, she lost a lifeline—the bus.

Before March 2020, Gina found fun, freedom and society by riding the bus, often spending 8 hours a day making her rounds. She had relationships with bus drivers, store clerks, pharmacists. She told them her stories and listened to theirs.

When COVID came to stalk us, she stopped riding, a wise decision but one that deprived her of people and activities. For a year and a half, she rarely left the house, and when she started occasionally going out, she took a cab.

But cabs are pricey. And not all that social. So it was with the kind of joy I feel when spring finally comes that I found a voicemail from Gina the other day:

“I just wanted to let you know that for the first time in two years, Mary, I rode the bus! Oh, I was a little nervous, but I was really just relaxed and comfortable and the bus was less crowded. It was nice.”

Gina Schmich in pre-pandemic times

Gina’s small and sometimes unsteady on her feet and she always worried she’ll be knocked over. She worries especially at the downtown bus transfer station, a reasonable fear given that someone did knock down our small mother there, a fall that broke her hip.

But the other day, two years into the pandemic, Gina found things changed. Fewer people, less to fear.

“It was really nice,” she reported in her voice message. “Because of the COVID they’re doing the six feet distancing downtown at the station and it was nice not to have people running into me and being all crazy. That was fun getting out on the bus. It was adventurous.”

Adventurous.

Gina’s use of the word struck me. It made me think about all the ways the pandemic has made us expand our notions of adventure.

In its early days, the mere fact of taking a walk through a neighborhood, or down a street of locked shops, felt adventurous. Even as the world opened up a bit, the previous routine remained exotic: a drink with a friend, a trip to the gym, a movie. Adventure!

In this time of grief and change, in which so many people have lost so much, there has been at least that for consolation: We learned to be newly excited, newly grateful, for things we once took for granted.

Mid-March marks the official two-year anniversary of all this loss, shock and change. I vividly remember that time, starting with Saturday, March 14, 2020.

That afternoon, I went to a coffeehouse in Uptown called Ridman’s. It’s far from my neighborhood but I often use coffeehouses as a reason to get out of my usual borders.

I ordered a cappuccino at the counter. Sat down on a sofa. Read a few pages of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

But I didn’t stay long because the news of the coronavirus had grown louder. So had the little voice that told me, “You shouldn’t be here.”

I woke up the next day and decided it was time to stop going into public spaces. A day or two after that, the world closed.

Now here we are two years later. A couple of days ago, inspired by Gina’s bus trip, I decided to mark the anniversary. I Googled Ridman’s to see if it had survived. It had.

So I drove there, ordered a cappuccino, read a book, glad that this little coffeehouse had made it, and gladder than before to be around for the little adventures. — Mary Schmich

Minced Words: A rundown of topics covered in “The Mincing Rascals” podcast.

What prompted the Tribune’s Lisa Donovan to say “I hate all of you!” to the rest of the panel? You’ll have to listen to this week’s episode to find out.

Lisa, Jon Hansen, John Williams and I discussed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s decision not to charge the police officers who killed Adam Toledo and Anthony Alvarez and her response to the conclusion of the Jussie Smollett case. Also whether Chicago should follow through on its threat to stop paying unvaxxed cops, what the world should do to help Ukraine and whether we should have daylight saving time year-round.

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

This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• In my real job I'm actually the fifth dentist, and I hit anyone in the mouth with a hammer if they dare to question my unorthodox dental beliefs. — @wildethingy

• Nurses should be allowed to veto one baby name a shift. — @ozzyunc

• You can Wang Chung at any time. Day or night. They don’t even check. —@PoodleSnarf

• The Riddler: Poor people have it. Rich people need it. If you eat it you die. What is it? Batman: I am going to beat the shit out of you and put you in jail. — @coolmathgame_

• You know you’re over 40 when you clean your house to the music you used to get drunk to. — @therealsoulsoup

• There are Americans dumb enough to complain about gas prices while donating money to an alleged billionaire for a new private plane, in case you wondered how we haven’t been able to stop the spread of COVID in this country yet. — @OhNoSheTwitnt

• Nothing matters anymore. Let the rabbit have cereal. — @ozzyunc

• You can tell a lot about someone by the way they treat waiters. O.J. Simpson, for example. — @zachreinert0

• I told my psychiatrist that I always have songs stuck in my head and he wrote something down. Probably that I’m cool. — @tigersgoroooar

• First person to look for a needle in a haystack: “This is going to be like I don't even know what.” — @Prof_Hinkley

Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here. And to participate in Tweet Madness, the bracket competition to choose the readers’ favorite tweet of 2021-22, click here.

Word watch

In Wednesday’s Tribune, letter writer Michael Oakes of Chicago referred to the “litany of (Jussie) Smollett’s misprisions,” and I have to admit that in all the reading I’ve done in my life I’ve never encountered the word “misprisions.” An online search of the Tribune’s website finds only one other use — a reference to “our country's misprisions” in a 2017 letter to Voice of the People by … Michael Oakes of Chicago.

Dictionary.com defines this term from English law as “a neglect or violation of official duty by one in office; a failure by one not an accessory to prevent or notify the authorities of treason or felony; a contempt against the government, monarch, or courts, as sedition, lese majesty, or a contempt of court; a mistake; misunderstanding.” Also “contempt or scorn.”

Hmm. Even if I’d known this word I would not have considered it le mot juste to describe Smollett’s shenanigans.

Today’s Tune

The other day while cleaning off some shelves I came across the songbook I assembled for when I was driving the carpool to elementary school. When the kids and I weren’t listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks, we were singing. Not pop hits or folk standards but often strange novelty numbers such as “Broccoli Shy,” Lou and Peter Berryman’s jaunty little number about a man who was once obsessed with the popular vegetable but then …

I had some broccoli in a bag / It went bad and made me gag

Smelled so strong I thought I’d die / Now I’m largely broccoli shy

The Berrymans, who are in their mid-70s, met in high school in Appleton, Wisconsin, and were married in 1967. They divorced about seven years later, but their wildly inventive musical collaboration has continued. They are both in long marriages to other people and live in Madison.

If this were Thanksgiving, I’d be linking you instead to “Uncle Dave’s Grace,” the Berrymans’ lyrical imagining of what happens if you ask a very earnest liberal to give the pre-meal blessing (lyrics).

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