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4-21-2022 (issue No. 32)
Today: Debate news / Meet Mincing Rascal Jon Hansen / a plea for Leonard Goodman to ride his high horse off into the sunset and leave the Chicago Reader alone / A leading scholar on abortion tells us what to expect when we’re expecting an end to Roe v. Wade / An appreciation for a Tony Soprano catchphrase / Mary Schmich on the mysterious absence of spring / an appreciation of a truly great American folk song / more …
Richard Irvin will debate his opponents after all.
Thursday marks 68 days until June 28, primary election day in Illinois, and it had been looking like well-funded Republican gubernatorial hopeful Irvin was planning to simply let his unavoidable TV commercials make his case to voters and deny his four main rivals the chance to challenge him in a public forum.
After all, in 2018, when a group of Democrats were vying to face incumbent Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, the main contenders — J.B. Pritzker, Chris Kennedy and Daniel Biss — began debating in October, five months ahead of primary election day, March 20. They agreed to six debates.
And in 2014, when the incumbent was Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, Republican hopefuls Rauner, Bill Brady, Kirk Dillard and Dan Rutherford kicked off a series of seven debate-style appearances 61 days before primary election day at a suburban forum that Rauner later complained was a "beat up Brucey” event.
Since we were closing in on the 61-day mark with no sign that Irvin had any plans to joust with his main rivals — Darren Bailey, Gary Rabine, Jesse Sullivan and Paul Schimpf — or subject himself to scrums of reporters, I reached out to his campaign.
Campaign spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis told me that, in fact, plans are now forming and debates are in the works. Her formal statement: “Mayor Irvin looks forward to sharing the stage with his opponents that will prove he is the best candidate to take on crime, corruption and high taxes under J.B. Pritzker’s watch.”
Look for the first one to be a “beat up Richie” event given his status as the best-funded candidate in the field. Here’s the Tribune’s Rick Pearson on the race:
Financial disclosure records filed late Monday by candidates for the Democratic and Republican primaries showed Irvin spent $9.5 million in advertising through March, almost half of the $20 million that billionaire Ken Griffin, a Pritzker nemesis, gave to the Aurora mayor’s campaign in February. ...
Only two of Irvin’s rivals for the GOP nomination — cryptocurrency venture capitalist Jesse Sullivan of Petersburg and state Sen. Darren Bailey of Xenia — spent substantial sums on advertising so far.
Sullivan spent $1.5 million on ads, among $2.4 million his campaign spent in the first quarter of the year. … Of the $1 million Bailey spent, $400,000 was attributed to advertising.
Pritzker put $90 million into his campaign fund earlier this year, and there’s more where that came front. Your scoreboard for approximate cash-on-hand balances for Republicans as of April 1 looks like this:
Irvin — $11 million
Sullivan — $8 million
Rabine — $1.4 million
Bailey — $900,000
Schimpf — $28,000
While we’re at it, here’s a similar scoreboard in the Democratic primary for secretary of state:
Former Illinois treasurer Alexi Giannoulias — $4.4 million
Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia — $1.1 million
Chicago Ald. David Moore — $39,000
Reporters are already griping publicly that Giannoulias is lying low and avoiding them.
Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.
Meet the Rascals: Jon Hansen
Jon Hansen / WGN-AM
Jon Hansen, 37, has been in the Mincing Rascals podcast rotation since April 2021. He's the host of “Your Money Matters” on WGN-AM 720 Monday through Thursday, 6-7 p.m., and “Let’s Get Legal” on Saturday afternoons. He is also the host of “It’s All Good,” a Block Club Chicago podcast, the in-arena host for the Chicago Blackhawks and the coordinating producer and reporter for “On The Block,” a weekly TV newsmagazine that’s a joint venture between WCIU-Ch. 26 and Block Club Chicago. He and his husband, Enrique Martinez Reyes, live in Roscoe Village neighborhood.
This autobiographical account was gleaned from a transcript of an interview with him:
I grew up in Downers Grove. My father was a firefighter and paramedic, and he became the fire chief in Lincolnwood in 1989 when I was about 5 years old. My mother was a public school art teacher in Westmont, and she quit to be a full time mom when my younger brother was born that same year.
Both of my brothers have gone on to become firefighters. Every Halloween, they would dress up as firefighters, and I would dress up as Harry Caray. The joke was that they wanted to rush into burning buildings and I wanted to rush to the scene with a camera and a microphone.
I went to Hillcrest Elementary School in Downers Grove, and my teachers immediately recognized me as someone who was outgoing and really wanted attention. In third grade, Mrs. Martinek made me the host when the class had game show day. So my dad, who was very handy, built me a “Wheel of Fortune” wheel.
When I was 8 or 9, my parents upgraded their camcorder and gave me their big old VHS camcorder. I used it to create a news channel at my elementary school that I called "Channel 7 Soybean News," because I knew that soybeans were big in Illinois. I pretended to report from the playground, interviewing friends and stuff. My friends and I also used to put on plays in the basement.
My favorite shows when I was a kid were “The Price is Right,” “Wheel of Fortune” and “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” So very early on I had a love for entertainment and game shows, but also serious hard news.
I guess you’d call me a quirky kid. I also remember staying up late at night under the covers listening to talk radio on WGN-AM or WMAQ-AM. I was obsessed with the Gulf War, and I was really into the 1992 presidential election between Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot, and I wasn't even 10 years old yet.
(Co-owner) Goodman is trying to bully us into compromising our editorial independence to indulge his whims. Because he’s blocked the sale, the paper can’t operate as a nonprofit, and we already knew it wasn’t viable as a for-profit. Within the next few weeks, what remains of the for-profit Reader will run out of money. Most of the Reader’s 35 workers make around $45,000 per year, and now a rich man thinks we should fear for our jobs because we dared try to correct his mistakes.
Goodman, a prominent local defense attorney, and Elzie Higginbottom, a real estate developer, bought the Reader from the Chicago Sun-Times for $1 in 2018, assumed its debts and invested more than $2 million in rescuing it, a civic-minded gestured for which Goodman was widely praised. He also began writing a regular column, which proved to be a perilous combination of roles. He fired back this week with “What really happened at the Reader,” a letter to the Tribune’s Voice of the People that explained the basics of the dispute:
Last November, I wrote a column expressing concern about my 6-year-old daughter receiving an mRNA vaccine. Like all my columns, it was fact-checked and edited. My editor thanked me for taking on the difficult topic and pronounced my research to be “bulletproof.” But after publication, following an uproar, Reader management hired an anonymous fact checker to rewrite my column and issue a report with nine points of disagreement, later expanded to 15.
The publisher offered me two options: remove the column from the Reader website or replace it with the new version that was extensively modified, to be followed by the fact checker report. I asked to publish a response to the report, which I disagreed with, and was told: “Your side is the actual column. The rebuttal is not a ‘side.’ It is a fact-checker’s report.”
Concerned about censorship, the Reader board passed a resolution in December enshrining protections for free speech as the paper moved to nonprofit status. Another stipulation involved equal representation on the nonprofit board for people on the side of free speech and dissent.
Reader management ignored the duly passed board resolution. Instead, they demonized and pressured me to sign off on the transition without the protections.
Well, I happen to have a copy of publisher Tracy Baim’s correspondence with Goodman — he supplied it to me! — and though she initially balked at the idea of a rebuttal to the fact check, she ultimately offered him three options, not two:
1) Replace the original column with an edited version that “still reflects all of (Goodman’s) key points of concern about vaccines … but with more caveats and nuance … (and) a short editor’s note at the top explaining the process.”
2) Remove the column from the paper’s website, offering “a short editor’s note saying we could not come to an agreement on changes.”
3) Add “an editor’s note above the original column, then the fact check, then your rebuttal.”
The proposed new edited version was not “extensively modified” as I read it. Both Goodman’s original and editor-rewritten columns begin with this passage:
As a father of a young child, I am pressured to get my daughter vaccinated for COVID-19. And like many Americans, I have concerns about giving my six-year-old a new vaccine that was not tested on humans until last year, and that has been approved only for “emergency use” in kids. The feverish hype by government officials, mainstream media outlets, and Big Pharma, and the systematic demonization and censorship of public figures who raise questions about the campaign, provide further cause for concern.
And end with this:
We have been kept in the dark about vaccine safety and efficacy by our government and its partners in Big Pharma, who tell us they have looked at the science and it supports vaccinating our children against a virus that presents them with only the most minuscule risk of serious illness. As a parent, I will demand more answers before simply taking their word.
Regarding his mention of censorship, as I have previously written, the reason the word “censorship” comes up is that Goodman’s representatives on the Reader’s board of directors invoked it in a Dec. 17 resolution urging that the transition of the paper to nonprofit status be contingent upon the adoption of a mission statement that says the Reader is "a forum for free speech and welcomes all opinions, especially controversial ones, and abhors censorship of any kind."
The casual use of the term "censorship" to describe editing decisions by newspaper editors is dismaying, and the idea that a publication should declare itself welcoming to "all opinions" is nothing short of bizarre. No remotely responsible publication “welcomes all opinions.” The board used similar wording in a Jan. 27 resolution that also called for Baim to be fired if she didn’t offer her resignation.
In his letter to the Tribune, Goodman wrote, “Reader management ignored the duly passed board resolution. Instead, they demonized and pressured me to sign off on the transition (to nonprofit status) without the protections.”
What Reader management did not do was take the column offline or publish the fact check followed by the rebuttal. Goodman got his way, in the end. And not because he was a persuasive columnist, but because he was a co-owner.
Yet he’s still pitching a self-righteous, reputation-shattering and ultimately destructive fit over this. “Beware of the fact checkers” is the headline on an essay he posted last week.
And he’s getting rightly hammered for it. An “Open letter to Len Goodman from Chicago journalists” posted Wednesday afternoon at Medium.com demands that Goodman drop his petulant obstructionism and immediately facilitate the sale of the financially struggling paper to the nonprofit Reader Institute for Community Journalism .
For long-time readers and Chicagoans, the Reader has been a stalwart and freely available window into the city’s underground music culture, inner workings of city government, and romance ads.
It is unconscionable that the publication that broke the Jon Burge police torture story, tirelessly covered TIF deals, and has lovingly and carefully chronicled so much of the city’s beauty, difficulty, and strangeness for five decades has an uncertain future because of one powerful, wealthy man.
As of 11 p.m. Wednesday, the letter had more than 200 signatories, including many current and former journalists from outlets in Chicago and around the country.
ONLINE ONLY UPDATE — The Tribune’s Robert Channick posted a very thorough explanation of the for-profit/nonprofit transitions issues on Thursday morning. Melody Mercado at Block Club Chicago also posted a useful summaryearlier this week. After posting this issue of the PS I overcame my reluctance to sign petitions of any sort — it gets hard-wired into you after a while — and added my name to the letter, given that my position on this matter is very clear by now.
The top of the letter advertises a protest rally for Thursday morning at the intersection in front of Goodman’s home on inner Lake Shore Drive. And while I endorse the sentiments in the letter — Goodman needs to set aside his bruised feelings and his writer’s indignation, give up this silly fight and help Baim and her staff move forward — I oppose on principle the idea of protesting at private residences.
He’s certainly already heard their message. Harassment of his family and his neighbors is not going to soften his heart.
News & Views
News: Netflix loses 200,000 subscribers and is reportedly considering taking steps to minimize password sharing.
View: Cracking down hard may prove counterproductive. Without password sharing, the Netflix video streaming service won’t be worth the $16 a month standard subscription fee for, well, I’ll guess millions of subscribers.
The Los Gatos, California, company estimated that about 100 million households worldwide are watching its service for free by using the account of a friend or another family member, including 30 million in the U.S. and Canada. (Associated Press)
Yeah, I can certainly see an attempt to rein in password sharing by large networks of friends and former friends. But family sharing, even when family members live in separate households? C’mon. I’d rather see them add occasional commercial breaks to their offerings, another option reportedly under consideration.
News: Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to offer free gas to certain Chicagoans advances through a City Council committee while mayoral hopeful Willie Wilson announced another $1 million gas giveaway for Saturday.
View: My better idea is free air for all. All this charity would be better directed at fully subsidizing tire-inflation kiosks at gas stations, the ones that used to be free. The U.S. Department of Energy says, “Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by about 0.2% for every 1 (pound per square inch) drop in the average pressure of all tires” and that keeping tires at their proper pressure can increase your gas mileage by up to 3%. That’s good for the pocketbook.
Top ten minor money-saving activities
Speaking of good for the pocketbook, earlier this week I posted a click survey asking readers about small acts of frugality that they might routinely perform. Here are the top 10, ranked from most to least common:
I save napkins and seasoning packets from restaurant carryout/delivery.
I add water to dish and laundry soap bottles when they appear to be empty and get one more use out of them.
I bring home the unused portion of hotel-size shampoo and conditioner bottles.
I rinse out and reuse zip-close plastic bags.
I wash and reuse disposable plastic cutlery and cups.
I reuse sheets of aluminum foil.
I rescue gift wrapping paper that's not too badly torn and use it again on another occasion.
I save the plastic bags that bread comes in and reuse them as Baggies.
I save lightly used napkins and paper towels in order to use them when I next have to blow my nose
I cut tubes of toothpaste and lotion when they're almost empty so I can scrape out what’s left.
Two percent of respondents answered, “I don't do any of these things. You people are nuts!”
A few people chided me on social media for dismissing these as mere acts of frugality and not part of a larger effort to save the planet. Yeah, well, symbolically, yes, but practically, no. You could do all 10 of these conscientiously for your entire life, and it probably wouldn’t compensate for the environmental damage (and additional cost) of exceeding the speed limit by 10 mph on one 500-mile car trip.
A former editor reminded me of a column I wrote in 1993 about Humberto Cruz, a syndicated columnist whose “Savings” column regularly described the tricks he and his wife employed to save money, such as wearing gym shorts and old T-shirts to bed in order to bank the price of pajamas. I included in that column a poem I wrote in which I imagined his life:
He wires his house with stripped twist ties
And walks ten miles for better buys
On toothpicks, sealing wax and grout
(Or better still . . . he does without!)
A man who stacks his cupboard liner
With ketchup packets from the diner;
Who uses tin cans 'stead of phones,
Eats his ice cream without cones,
Then reuses plastic forks,
Baggies, floss and soggy corks.
A man whose cards of Christmas cheer
Are just the ones he got last year
But with the senders' names erased
and "Love, Humberto" in their place.
Land of Linkin’
In honor of 4/20, the Illinois Policy Institute on Wednesday released “Illinois’ half-baked marijuana legalization costs state $600M.” “Illinois has the lowest number of marijuana-related business licenses per capita of any legal state,” said the report. “Additionally, Illinois’ cannabis taxes are the third highest on average. … Compared to other states with legal cannabis, Illinois’ cannabis revenues are the second lowest in the nation proportional to the size of its economy. … If Illinois wants to reap the benefits of legal cannabis by maximizing its tax revenue and reducing illegal sales, it should lower and simplify its cannabis taxes as well as remove the cap on licenses.”
“The Rise of the Retro License Plate” from Route Fifty: “This winter, for example, Michigan introduced a new specialty plate based on the design of Michigan license plates from the 1960s. The plates are dark blue—almost black—with gold lettering that simply says the state’s name and “Water-Winter Wonderland. … A retro design is now California’s most popular specialty plate.” Alas, vintage Illinois plates are not mentioned in the article.
“Gasoline isn’t all that’s gone up,” Neil Steinberg’s Sun-Times column last Thursday disclosed that the newsstand price of his newspaper just quietly doubled, to $2 a day from $1 (the Sunday Sun-Times remains $3; the daily Tribune is $3 and the Sunday Tribune is $5.75). “This is a moment of great peril for the United States and the world,” Steinberg wrote. “Nationalism is on the rise, with all the violence, oppression, deceit and wrongdoing that go with it. A free press is perhaps the most powerful weapon there is to stop it — that’s why the first thing tyrants do is throttle the media. The Sun-Times is proudly unthrottled, undiminished, and your extra buck will help keep us that way.”
I’m not a fan of magic, but I am a fan of videos that reveal how magic tricks are done. "Linking Rings Magic Trick Revealed!" not only shows you how magicians link and unlink seemingly solid metal rings, but it also shows you how much sleight of hand artistry is required to make the illusion work. I think the trick is more impressive when you know how it’s done.
The Picayune Sentinel on the air: Today, Thursday, I’ll be on WCPT-AM 820 at the special, early time of 2:15 until 3 p.m. with host Joan Esposito to chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.
The Picayune Sentinel preview: Mondays in the 11:30 a.m.- noon block, 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.
What to expect when you’re expecting an end to Roe v. Wade
Santa Clara University School of Law professor Michelle Oberman is one of this country’s leading scholars on the social and legal issues surrounding abortion. For her 2018 book “Her Body, Our Laws,” she traveled to El Salvador and Chile to research what happens in countries where abortion is outlawed in all or nearly all cases, something that seems likely to happen in many states if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns previous decisions supporting abortion rights.
Oberman, who is a friend from the days she was on the faculty at the DePaul University College of Law, is out with a new academic paper, “What will and won’t happen when abortion is banned,” that discusses the “downstream consequences” of an end to protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). It’s well worth a read no matter which side of this issue you’re on.
She asks readers to consider the implications of the often-overlooked connection between abortion and poverty.*
Half of all US abortions go to the 13% of Americans living below the poverty line. Those living in poverty or near poverty make up a full 76% of abortions every year. … People have abortions when they cannot afford another child.
The best way to deter abortion is to reduce unwanted pregnancy by increasing access to contraception.
In the world’s wealthier nations, over the past quarter century, rates of unintended pregnancies dropped by 30%, triggering a decline in abortion rates from 46 abortions per 1000 women of reproductive age to an average of 27.
Like in other wealthy countries, U.S. abortion rates have dropped significantly in recent decades. The decline is evident across almost every demographic in the country — younger, older, Northern, Southern. With one exception: abortion rates have remained constant among the poorest Americans. …
When the Affordable Care Act mandated insurance coverage for contraception, the unintended pregnancy rate dropped from 44.7% to 37.9%. And yet, the anti-abortion movement has opted to oppose efforts to increase access to contraception. Indeed abortion opponents vigorously fought the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate, which the Supreme Court ultimately struck down in 2014.
As a result, a poor woman in the U.S. is more than five times more likely than an affluent woman to have an unintended pregnancy. And when she does, odds are she will contemplate abortion.
Oberman also points out that bans are not very effective in reducing the overall number of abortions, particularly in an age when abortion-inducing drugs are safe, effective and easily available.
Even in Central America, which boasts the world’s strictest abortion ban, 1 in 3 pregnancies ends in abortion, largely induced by medicines purchased online or on the street. This market already exists in the U.S., where websites such as Plan C, Choix, Women on Web, Aid Access and Hey Jane along with countless international pharmacies, help anyone with a debit card and an address to self-manage an abortion.
When we think about how abortion bans will work, in practice, class and race matter. Because poverty is not colorblind, those impacted by abortion bans will be disproportionately young, poor, Black and brown Americans, for whom abortion bans come as one in a long list of factors that circumscribe their reproductive lives and life options. They are more likely to experience unintended pregnancy, and where abortion is outlawed, they are more likely to struggle with accessing abortion, whether by traveling to a legal jurisdiction, or by identifying reliable information about how to safely end an unwanted pregnancy with abortion medications.
Oberman also casts doubt on the hopes of abortion opponents that bans will lead to noticeable increases in adoptions:
Even in the years prior to Roe, when the stigma of unwed motherhood led some facing pregnancy to place their babies, only 9% of women chose adoption. Much of that rate was driven by white women, because the two-parent family norm was less entrenched among Black and brown Americans. Today, the stigma is gone: 40% of all children are born out of wedlock. When faced with an unintended pregnancy, fewer than 5% of people seriously consider adoption, and of those, fewer than 2% ultimately place their children with adoptive families.
And what happens when women who are refused abortion services do give birth? Oberman cites a 10-year longitudinal study of “hundreds of women who sought abortions, but were turned away because they were beyond the clinic’s gestational limits.”
(Their children) had greater odds (72% vs. 55%) of living in poverty compared to children of women who received a wanted abortion. Similarly, (their) children were more likely (87% vs. 70%) to live in a household in which their mother was not able to afford necessary living expenses such as food, housing, and transportation compared to children of women who received a wanted abortion.”
She then spells out why this is a societal concern:
Children who experience poverty, particularly during early life or for an extended period, are at risk of a host of adverse health and developmental outcomes through their life course. Poverty has a profound effect on specific circumstances, such as birth weight, infant mortality, language development, chronic illness, environmental exposure, nutrition, and injury. Child poverty also influences genomic function and brain development. …
Children living in poverty are at increased risk of difficulties with self-regulation and executive function, such as inattention, impulsivity, defiance, and poor peer relationships. Poverty can make parenting difficult, especially in the context of concerns about inadequate food, energy, transportation, and housing. Child poverty is associated with lifelong hardship.
Oberman also describes the difference between the U.S. anti-abortion movement’s focus on criminalizing abortion and the sorts of policies that might reduce abortion demand by encouraging child-bearing. She draws a contrast with countries such as France and Israel:
(In the U.S.) there is no paid parental leave, and no job security at all beyond the first twelve weeks of unpaid leave. There is no child allowance. The Covid-related child income tax break, which reduced child poverty by 30%, was permitted to lapse after a single year. The goal of providing universal access to quality day care and preschool remains a pipedream. The federal assistance program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, is so under-funded that no state’s subsidy amounts to more than 60% of the federal poverty line, with the result that even in states with relatively generous monthly allocations, families cannot afford modest rent.
In the end, Oberman predicts that the most visible consequence of U.S. abortion bans will be an uptick in the number of single-parent families — mothers and babies —living in poverty. Already, more than 1 in 3 single-parent families live below the poverty line.
Banning abortion without aggressively working to offset child poverty will drive up these numbers, posing an existential challenge for people who have supported abortion bans but who cannot help but be disturbed by the ways in which they fall short of expectations.
She also observes that permitting abortion to save the life of the mother should not offer much reassurance.
There is surprisingly little agreement on what constitutes a life-threatening pregnancy. … Yet the struggle to define what constitutes a life-threatening pregnancy, (or depending upon the law, a qualifying rape or fetal anomaly), is just the start. Which parties' interests will be represented at these adjudicatory proceedings, however they are configured? Will the pregnant patient be entitled to a lawyer? Will the fetus? If unhappy with the outcome, can either side appeal? Will there be an expedited appeals process? By what criteria will adjudicators be chosen? Will these be adversarial proceedings, with experts from the state and from the pregnant patient’s medical team, or will the patient’s doctor’s testimony suffice? How will the government determine whose interests it represents: those of the patient in peril, or those of the fetus?
These are serious questions, made all the more so because they implicate vital interests and therefore trigger Constitutional due process rights.
In other words, what to expect if Roe goes away? Feckless chaos.
*Excerpts lightly edited and amended with Oberman’s assistance.
Rushing through New York’s LaGuardia Airport recently in an attempt to make a connecting flight, Johanna and I were comforted by the words of Tony Soprano following his mother’s death in season three of HBO’s “The Sopranos.”
Either our flight has left or it hasn’t. The airline will eventually get us back to Chicago. Maybe we’ll have to stay the night in an airport lounge. But what are you gonna do?
Worry more? Get upset? Rage at the airline for the delay on our first flight? No, the die was cast. What are you gonna do?
We missed the connection but got on a later flight, armed for the future with a new slogan for serenity. What are you gonna do?
Friends have been surprised and jealous to learn that we’re just now getting around to watching “The Sopranos,” the groundbreaking drama that went off the air after 86 episodes nearly 15 years ago. They, too, wish they could again be experiencing it for the first time.
In ranking it the best TV show ever, Rolling Stone called “The Sopranos” “the crime saga that cut the history of TV in two, kicking off a golden age when suddenly anything seemed possible.”
(Writer and producer David) Chase showed how much storytelling ambition you could bring to television, and it didn't take long for everybody else to rise to his challenge. The breakthroughs of the next few years — “ The Wire,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” — couldn't have happened without “The Sopranos” kicking the door down. … "The Sopranos” remains the standard all ambitious TV aspires to meet.
Mary Schmich: Missing— Chicago spring. A detective April Hope mystery
My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. This week’s offering was a reprint of her April 17, 2018 Tribune column:
Detective April Hope stomped into the Chicago police station feeling as gloomy as the springtime sky, as low as a dirty sidewalk, as tired as a cliche.
"Get your bleepin' feet off my desk," she snarled.
She swatted at Officer Hardy Boyle's snow boots. Snow boots! In spring. God, she hated this town. She hated her filthy coat. She hated her ugly hat. She hated Boyle's beefy mug, which was even ruddier than usual.
"Boyle," she said. "What happened to your face?"
"It's my tan!" he said. "Don't you follow me on Facebook?
I've been in Florida!"
Detective Hope shuddered, and not only because the station was as cold as the bleepin' case she'd just been assigned. Her shudder was also a show of contempt for all those Chicago wimps who'd recently been to Florida, or San Diego, or Arizona and spent their time gloating about it on Facebook.
She hated them all, their stupid bathing suits and their silly flip-flops and their mojitos with the stupid swizzle sticks.
Above all, she hated that while they'd had the foresight to go somewhere warm in so-called springtime, she was stuck in this pothole-pitted tundra working this bleepin' cold case, again.
She glanced down at her desk, at the label on the old folder.
"Missing: Chicago Spring."
Every bleepin' April the boss dumped this duty on her. Every. Bleepin'. Year.
This week on the podcast, Jon Hansen, Heather Cherone, Austin Berg, host John Williams and I discussed the lifting of mask mandates, gas giveaways, the ward-level casino politics, marijuana in Illinois and the fairness and wisdom of banning Russian athletes from international competitions.
Congratulations to Rascal emerita Lisa Donovan. Robert Feder reports she’s been hired away from the Tribune to become “senior publishing editor for The Wall Street Journal. Starting May 11, Donovan will serve in a leadership role on the publishing desk, which works with global bureaus to edit, code and publish stories and other content for various platforms.”
Don’t miss the entry on Jon Hansen in my Meet the Rascals series.
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:
Give a man a fish and he will think, “What a creepy gift.” Teach a man to fish and he will think, “My God, I have never known such boredom.” — @BoneChocolates
Couldn’t go to Coachella this year but I recreated the experience by flushing $1,000 down my toilet and repeatedly throwing up on myself. — @SamGrittner
Self-righteousness is when you take yourself so seriously that no one else can take you seriously. — @UnFitz
It's terribly rude when you assume I'm interested in your opinion after I've just explained to you my correct opinion. — @wildethingy
I’m at that age where I’m young enough to pick up new slang but fo shizzle too old to realize we stopped saying it. — @OhHeyKay2
I'm sorry your baby is crying right now. Have you tried taking it farther away from me? — @abbycohenwl
Waldo on trial. Judge: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you find the defendant? Foreman: Look closely for the striped sweater and beanie, your honor. — @RickAaron
Instead of adding "in bed" to the end of your fortune cookie messages try "in theory." Now all your fortunes will sound sarcastic. — @MelvinofYork
My Mexican waiter just put my food down in front of another white lady who looked nothing like me. I get it now. Oh, hang on, that's not my waiter. — @craydrienne
Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.
“Michael Row the Boat Ashore” is a classic bit of Americana, a song many of us learned in elementary school or at camp and so familiar that it feels like a cliche, as banal as “Old MacDonald” or “B-I-N-G-O.”
It’s on my mind this week because I sang it for my mother in a private YouTube video I made for her. She’s 90, and, as I’ve explained before, is dealing with advanced, heartbreaking dementia. But fragments of old songs remain in her head, so when I visit her, I always pull out the guitar and my father and I sing a selection of standards where she often can join in at least parts of the choruses.
“Alleluia!” is still in there.
Anyway, I made this video in hopes that she could watch it on the big screen and would enjoy singing along with me even when I wasn’t there. It didn’t work for various reasons, but when I went to check my YouTube channel, I saw that the video had been hit with a “copyright claim” based on “LatinAutorPerf, LatinAutor - SonyATV, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, PEDL, Sony Music Publishing,” said the notice.
Evidently some artificial stupidity program had audited the songs I’d croaked out for my mom and had also acknowledged a copyright claim on a song that is at least 160 years old.
The best history of the song I could locate (a lengthy 2019 blog entry by Mike Sylwester of Seward, Neb.) says:
The song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" apparently originated and developed on St Helena Island, which is a 64-square-mile area just off the coast from Beaufort, South Carolina. … The island was populated mostly by slaves, who worked on plantations that grew rice, indigo, cotton and spices. The slaves had a distinct culture that is called Gullah, which preserved many African words and customs.
Soon after the Civil War began, the Union navy captured Fort Freemont and then all of St Helena Island at the end of 1861. The White plantation owners fled, and a northern abolitionist, Charles Pickard Ware, was assigned to administer the island. He was a Harvard graduate who collected folk songs, and while he held this administrative position, during the years 1862-1865, he wrote down many songs that he heard the former slaves sing. After the Civil War, in 1867, he published a book titled Slave Songs of the United States. The song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" was included in the book, and its words were written down by Ware in 1863 from the singing of former slaves as they were rowing a boat between the island and the mainland.
In that book, Ware wrote, “I have no doubt (“Michael Row the Boat Ashore”) is a real spiritual — it being the archangel Michael that is addressed.”
The song remained fairly obscure until Pete Seeger brought it to his group “The Weavers,” who released it on a 1957 album, but it didn’t become a standard until The Highwaymen had a chart-topping hit with it under the title “Michael” in 1961.
As tired of this song as you may be, it’s musically and lyrically tremendous. I was reminded of that nearly 40 years ago at Pinewoods Dance Camp south of Boston when Tony Barrand walked into the evening gathering of campers and without a word of introduction sang the opening line in that powerful, unforgettable voice of his.
For a beat, some of us wondered, “Why is Tony, a legendary singer with a huge repertoire of distinctive songs from the British Isles, leading us in an old American song we’ve all heard a million times?”
But one roof-raising, spine-tingling refrain later, we knew the answer.
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You killed CNN+! Only a day after you trashing them the parent company pulled the plug. I am humbled by your power and influence. Or maybe your ability to channel the streaming desires of the general public.
Glad to see that the GOP gov candidates will have some debates. Wish there was a way to have Pritzker face a similar forum that might pierce his relentless 'feel good' branding campaign that has already been running since last fall.
You killed CNN+! Only a day after you trashing them the parent company pulled the plug. I am humbled by your power and influence. Or maybe your ability to channel the streaming desires of the general public.
Glad to see that the GOP gov candidates will have some debates. Wish there was a way to have Pritzker face a similar forum that might pierce his relentless 'feel good' branding campaign that has already been running since last fall.