Once again, Mr. Mayor, what's your Plan B?

Migrant housing challenge exposes Brandon Johnson's political weakness

12-07-2023 (issue No. 118)

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

This week:

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Mayor “Now What?” faces yet another foreseeable challenge

• How good was that field goal attempt? — I want to know!

• News and Views —

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• “Songs of Good Cheer” update — First show is tonight!

• Mary Schmich’s book recommendation

• “The Mincing Rascals” podcast preview

• Quotables —

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Tune of the Week — Troy Sivan’s “Rush,” a “sublime, orgiastic summer anthem.”

Last week’s winning tweet

Me: It's not about how many times you fall, it's about how many times you get back up. Cop: That's not how field sobriety tests work. — @HenpeckedHal

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

“Now What?” Johnson faces yet another foreseeable challenge

This week’s announcement that the state is pulling funding from the migrant tent camp that was under construction in the Brighton Park neighborhood based on environmental concerns — concerns that had been percolating for many weeks — was another setback for Brandon “Now What?” Johnson, the mayor who seems to lack Plan B’s.

The idea of housing thousands of asylum-seekers in large, temporary, heated tent structures seems to me like the best of a lousy set of options for sheltering the new arrivals through the winter months. Long term, they need permanent housing, but short term, they need shelter, sanitation and safety, all of which the tent project promised.

But putting it on a former industrial site in a neighborhood where residents were organized against it didn’t look wise even before the release Friday of an environmental assessment, which the Sun-Times summarized this way:

Arsenic, mercury, lead, manganese and a chemical used in PVC were among the heavy metals and toxic contaminants discovered in the soil at a Southwest Side site that is being prepared to house newly arrived migrants.

In each case, these contaminants were detected at levels that require cleanup to protect human health. … In addition, traces of other toxic chemicals, including cyanide, pesticides and the long-banned, cancer-causing compounds known as PCBs were also found.

It was understandable that Gov J.B. Pritzker decided to yank state support for the construction under the circumstances, but puzzling that his office had given the go-ahead for the project before the final assessment was complete. The lack of communication and coordination between the city and state reflects poorly on both Pritzker and Johnson.

But given the likelihood that the site at 34th Street and California Avenue would be deemed too toxic for the tent camp, Johnson seemed to be caught flat-footed, without a solid alternative plan. From ABC-7:

The mayor was asked three separate times on Tuesday what his "Plan B" is, and there was no clear answer as to whether the city has another outdoor location in mind for a base camp location that could replace the Brighton Park site.

"The mission is still very much alive. I've said from the very beginning, especially as winter is approaching and weather is shifting is to get people out of police stations," Johnson said. "As other folks have asked for Plan B, I've been planning for Plan B, C and D and E and F from the very moment that I became the mayor of the city of Chicago."

Sounds familiar. Here’s the Sun-Times March 22:

Mayoral challenger Brandon Johnson acknowledged Wednesday he needs the City Council and the Illinois General Assembly to enact major portions of his $800 million tax plan, but refused to identify a Plan B if either body turns thumbs-down.

So far an inability to see around political corners has been a hallmark of Johnson’s brief tenure. He has big ideas, many of them laudable, but seems unprepared with lesser or optional back-up ideas when he runs into opposition. The current situation reinforced a fairly startling criticism leveled at him and the city’s progressive movements by one of his council allies, Ald. Jeannette Taylor, 20th, during a Nov. 28 appearance on the daily podcast hosted by Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky.

“We should not be on the fifth floor (the location of the mayor’s office in City Hall), and I’m speaking my whole heart. … We were not ready, because we haven’t been in government long enough to know how government really runs. … We’re pretending like now we got the power, let us show you how it’s supposed to be done. And we look real stupid right now. … It feels like we’ve got some more work to do, and we don’t know government as well as the folks that have been in charge of it. We’ve got a lot of challenges, and I feel like … we’re so concentrated on the fifth floor now, that we are not organizing.” (via Block Club Chicago)

Johnson needs a game plan, not just big ideas. When his ambitions collide with reality he’s got to have strong alternatives and good answers at the ready. Because the way things have been going, “Now What?” looks like it ought to be his nickname.

All I want for Christmas is a field-goal distance estimator

Whenever a kicker makes a long field goal by a significant margin, I find myself wondering how much longer the kick could have been; what was the distance the ball traveled before it dipped below the plane of the crossbar? An extra five yards? Ten yards?

Televised sports offers so many high-tech measurements — speed of a pitch, exit velocity of a batted ball, time spent in the pocket and so on — that it would seemingly be easy for an announcer to say, “The kick from 51 yards is good, and would have been good from 63 yards.”

And while I’m making a wish list, how about quick, laser-guided first-down measurements? Teams get flagged for “delay of game,” but then the officiating crew performs the ancient, inexact and time-consuming ritual of having the chain gang trot onto the field to see if the ref has spotted the ball past the first-down line.

The spot of the ball should be done electronically and the measurement generated instantly in the press box.

News & Views

News: The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the chairman of the Chicago City Council’s Police Committee is urging police to relax restrictions on vehicle chases.

View: I’m inclined to agree, having read far too many news stories lately of police seeing evildoers at work, starting to give chase and then being called off by a dispatcher or supervisor. The Sun-Times reports:

The (current) policy requires every vehicular pursuit to meet a balancing test: the need to “immediately apprehend the fleeing suspect” must outweigh “the level of inherent danger created by a motor vehicle pursuit.” …

“People run from the police and know that police aren’t going to chase them. They flee in cars and they go do more robberies,” (Anthony Driver, president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability) said. …

“Those chases do get very dangerous. That decision was made at a time when not only officers were being injured but so were members of the public,” Driver said. “It’s trying to find the right balance between … keeping pedestrians safe, but also making sure that folks are held accountable.”

And yet:

Over the years, Chicago taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to innocent pedestrians, motorists and passengers killed or injured during police pursuits gone bad, despite repeated overhauls of the pursuit policy.

The corrosive perils of a brazen criminal element that knows little fear of apprehension needs to be figured in here as well. This does seem like a problem that tracking technology could go some distance in solving.

News: Illinois Democratic U.S. Rep Jonathan Jackson of Chicago declined to vote to expel New York Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos from Congress, saying he was “deeply concerned by the precedent such an expulsion sets” and citing a concern for “due process.”

View: Ugh. For whatever reason, the freshman lawmaker Jackson seems to think the criminal law threshold of innocent unless proven guilty ought to apply to the civil sanction of ousting a brazen sleazebag from Congress. Presumably this means that he would not have voted to impeach Donald Trump.

News: The Oxford English Dictionary has dubbed “rizz,” said to be internet slang shorthand for “charisma,” as its word of the year.

View: Cute, but no. I’ve seen this word a few times and rolled my eyes hard each time. It feels contrived, yet the OED seems to want to allow “rizz” to happen. The coinage is not “authentic,” Merriam-Webster’s word for 2023, and sounds like something generated by “AI,” which is Collins Dictionary’s choice (though “AI” is an abbreviation, not a word). USA Today columnist Rex Huppke has an entertaining riff on rizz dysfunction:

My teenager would come home from school and start saying things like “rizz” and “lowkey” and “salty” and “finna” and I felt isolated and confused.

Then one day I tried to say something charming to my spouse and it just didn’t work. I felt like such a failure. She said it happens to plenty of people my age, but that didn’t make me feel better. It was clear I was suffering from low-rizz.

News: Donald Trump blames artificial intelligence for Lincoln Project ads that make him “look as bad and pathetic as Crooked Joe Biden.”

View: The big problem with AI is not so much that deep-fake technology can make things appear as they are not, but that it can totally blur to nearly erase the line between what’s true and what’s false. Trump has become increasingly incoherent and stumbly — the Lincoln Project commercials use real footage — but when he claims that the footage is faked, his supporters will eagerly believe him because the claim is no longer wholly implausible.

Not to be unduly alarmist, but democracy can’t succeed without fairly clear boundaries between truth and lies and without a public willing to find the distinction meaningful.

News: Sports Illustrated names Colorado football coach Deion Sanders as the magazine’s Sportsperson of the Year.

View: Wha? How about Shohei Ohtani, Breanna Stewart, Coco Gauff, Joel Embiid or any of a number of other athletes who stood out in the past year? Colorado went 4-8 in Sanders’ first year.

News: Spotify cancels “Heavyweight” podcast as part of a 17% staff layoff.

View: This is ominous and sad news. “Heavyweight” is a consistently compelling podcast in which host Jonathan Goldstein helps listeners remove a heavy weight from their minds — sometimes their consciences — about events in their pasts. Spotify, which already made dramatic cuts to its podcast division earlier this year, also yanked funding from “Stolen,” a podcast that won the Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award in 2023. Vox Media, Pushkin Industries, Amazon and SiriusXM have also cut funding to their podcasts this year, and this week’s news comes less than a month after the “On The Media” podcast reported:

The podcast industry has seen a staggering number of layoffs over the past year, and they've hit public radio hard. In April, NPR laid off 10 percent of its staff, and cancelled popular podcast-only shows like “Louder Than a Riot.” On the Media’s producing station, WNYC, recently canceled “More Perfect” and “La Brega,” and cut staff members from “Radiolab,” “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” “On the Media” and elsewhere. The company may also sunset Anna Sale’s “Death, Sex, And Money.”

The medium isn’t going anywhere. Overall listenership is up. But it’s so fragmented by offerings and competition for listeners’ attention and advertisers is so fierce that the money may be drying up for expensive, prestige offerings. I hope and trust that “Heavyweight” will find new funding and a new home, and continue its fascinating exhumations.

News: Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson says plans to publicly release thousands of hours of Jan. 6, 2021 video inside the U.S. Capitol because “we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the (Department of Justice).”

View: Why this isn’t a front-page scandal is beyond me. A leader of the Republicans, the party that once preened about being a champion of law and order, is openly admitting to trying to protect vandals and cop beaters.

Land of Linkin’

• Apple and Spotify have released their top 10 podcasts of 2023. So have The New York Times and Time. Vogue lists its best 20 while Esquire has its top 24.

• “The Case for Speed-watching How I came to love watching TV shows really fast. (I swear I’m not a monster.)” by Nicholas Quah, Vulture. “At 1.25x speed, the dialogue on TV shows doesn’t sound comically hastened. To my ears, the speech just flows more freely, with an artificial layer of added pep.”

• “Hard pass on this stupid contest” is my take on the Dr. Pepper football shoveling game.

• Gewgaw alert: Wirecutter’s list of the top 100 gifts for the holiday season includes an avocado vase, a spoon rest, a passport cover, a Lego flower bouquet and an ultrasonic squeak toy for dogs.

• “Mayor Brandon Johnson’s mental health plan in Chicago starts small but carries big political implications,” a thorough report on this vital, controversial issue from the Tribune’s Jake Sheridan.

• “How did Indian Boundary Park get its name?” by Kadin Mills for WBEZ-FM’s “Curious City” explains that the name of the North Side park “commemorates more than just a boundary line. It’s also a reminder of Chicago’s complicated history with Native people.” It also explains why Indian Boundary Golf Course on the far Northwest Side shares the same history.

• Politico: “Obamacare is even more popular than the last time Trump tried to kill it.” “Roughly three-in-five Americans like the 2010 health care law … and some of the Affordable Care Act’s better-known provisions — like protections for preexisting health conditions — engender even greater support.”

• “The media’s momentary fascination with Nikki Haley,” by Mark Jacob. “The GOP candidate is ‘having a moment,’ but media must realize she’s no moderate.” And he gives example after example of Haley’s extremism.

• “If Trump wins” is an extraordinary and sobering collection of essays in The Atlantic from all along the political spectrum. See also “Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign, in His Own Menacing Words: Trump’s language has become darker, harsher and more threatening during his third run for the White House” in The New York Times (gift link)

• Here is a simple video guide to how gerrymandering works.

  

  I agree that it is a repellent and undemocratic practice, but I’m not ready to endorse unilateral disarmament by Illinois Democrats, though 538 reports that the Democrats in general are evening up the national score. Which party will dare to push for federal prohibitions on gerrymandering?

• I never get tired of watching the great Justin Kaufmann, now of Axios Chicago, improvise his way through “Regrets: Boxes,” a roughly three-minute 2007 production by filmmaker Steve Delahoyde:

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Nazis in the news: Popular Information reported that the Texas Republican Party has rejected a ban on its association “with any individual or organization that is known to espouse anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, or Holocaust denial.”   And The Atlantic flagged Substack’s “Nazi problem.”

■ Media watcher Tom Jones compares Donald Trump’s threats against MSNBC to “the kind of things they do in countries with dictators.”

■ Trump’s niece, Mary—who’s launched a newsletter “exposing my family … to keep them out of power”—says Trump kids’ mortgages shatter the myth of their wealth.

■ Grammer policed: Frasier star Kelsey Grammer’s public relations team cut short a BBC Radio interview after he acknowledged that he still supports Donald Trump.

■ Block Club spotlights a West Side high school whose enrollment has dropped 94 percent in 16 years—to just 33 students now.

■ Critic Richard Roeper praises a new documentary about “the looniest, most disjointed, garish, ill-conceived and at times indecipherably bizarre and undeniably dreadful television programming in the history of the medium,” 1978’s “Star Wars Holiday Special,” which aired just once, but endures on YouTube.

■ End-of-year layoffs at media companies include New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz.

■ Raising a curtain on behavioral economics, The Messenger explains how shopping at Costco can make you fat.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Cheer Chat

Today, Thursday, marks the first in a five-show run for “Songs of Good Cheer” at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. Cast member Fred Campeau will be reviving this gorgeous Joe Newberry song as this holiday singalong tradition reaches its 25th year.

Mary Schmich and I co-host the evening, and the band lets us play along with them though many familiar and fresh songs of the season. There are still a few tickets left for most of the shows. Here is the ticket link.

Mary Schmich recommends “Crossroads”

Mary is busy this week, as I am, with final preparations for “Songs of Good Cheer” — see just above — so I thought I’d pass along and second her recent recommendation to me of author Jonathan Franzen’s 2021 opus, “Crossroads.”

It’s a 600-page novel set largely in a fictional Chicago suburb 50 years ago, and I was initially hesitant to start in due to its length and that it’s part of a planned trilogy Franzen says will "span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day." That sounded exhausting, and I didn’t want to plow through so many pages — hours, actually, as I listened to the audiobook — and then be left hanging.

But surprisingly quick for a doorstop book, with exquisitely and sensitively drawn characters and a story that draws you along even though most of the events that drive the narrative are based on ordinary conflicts and everyday tensions. And though the family saga doesn’t wrap up neatly by the end of “Crossroads,” I felt satisfied, not clinging to the edge of a literary cliff.

Minced Words

I took the week off from “The Mincing Rascals” podcast, but you’ll want to hear the newsy badinage among host John Williams and panelists Neil Steinberg, Cate Plys and Austin Berg. From the show page:

The state of Illinois halting the construction of a migrant shelter in Brighton Park. How has the Brandon Johnson administration handled the crisis? What could the administration have done differently? Austin is having a hard time keeping track of all the mistakes being made by the Johnson administration. The corruption trial of former 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke continues. The Rascals break down the latest trial details. And Neil tells us about a special gift he received from former Ald. Burke. This week, disgraced former Congressman George Santos joined Cameo. John finds this shameful! What do the other Rascals think?

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Quotables

A public service haiku from me to Chicagoans: Dude, where is my car? / Lower lower Wacker Drive / Snow tow starts tonight … State Rep. Kam Buckner on Nov. 30

If someone gives an arsonist a gas can and matches to torch a building, they’re complicit. And if someone votes for Donald Trump to burn down democracy, they’re complicit too. … Mark Jacob

"The world is going to the dogs; children no longer obey their parents; elders no longer obey the laws; people are losing respect for the church; immorality is rife; the world is going to the dogs." … a translation of a 6,000-year old Babylonian cuneiform inscription as reproduced in the January 26, 1940, issue of Radio Guide magazine.

Insurance … is not only inedible but intangible. It is a resource that customers hope never to need, a product that functions somewhat like a tax on fear. The average person cannot identify which qualities, if any, distinguish one company’s insurance from another’s. ... from Kaity Weaver’s New York Times profile of Stephanie Courtney, the woman who plays “Flo” from Progressive

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

I have strong doubts that this is an actual text exchange, but it’s amusing and I’ll allow it.

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

•  Waiter: So how is everything? Me: Great! Waiter: (disgusted) Even war? — @furby_hancock

• I caved and put on a movie for my kid and her playdate but told her in this house we call movies “arts and crafts” in case her parents ask what she did here. — @IHideFromMyKids

• Twitter is for people who tried suffering in silence and realized it wasn't for them. — @raoulvilla

• Dire has to be my least favorite form of consequences. — @benedictsred

• Professor: There are no stupid questions. Me: What happens if you stab someone with a healing crystal?  Professor: There is one stupid question. — @anoticingsenpa1

• [Werner Herzog voice] Filled with sugary juice, he brings joy to children everywhere. And yet Kool-Aid Man feels empty; his grief constant and unforgiving — @Cpin42

• If you’re going to spend money getting a degree, just major in calligraphy. Then you can have any degree you want. — @benedictsred

• My husband said we need to start exercising and get into shape so I’m going to wake up early tomorrow and start looking for a new husband. — @traciebreaux

• Welcome to parenthood. One of the most relaxing parts of your day is sitting on the toilet. — @mommajessiec

• I just told my boss that "STFU" stands for "Sincere Thanks For Understanding" and it's really important that none of you tell him otherwise. — @MelvinofYork

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

I decided this week to listen to each entry on Associated Press music writer Maria Sherman’s list of the top 10 songs of 2023 — none of which I’d heard before — and to choose my favorite. It was the exuberantly raunchy “Rush” by gay Australian singer and actor Troye Sivan.

 I feel the rush
Addicted to your touch
Oh, I feel the rush
(It's so good, it's so good)

I don’t list to a lot of pop, soet me quote at length from the Wikipedia’s summary of critical response to the song from those who do:

Michael Sun of The Guardian … described Sivan's track as "pure gay smut.” …

Shaad D'Souza of Pitchfork awarded the song their "Best New Track" distinction and observed that "Rush" is "unconcerned with anything but pure ecstasy." D'Souza highlighted the chorus and the associated "homoeroticism of a football chant" paired with a "piano-house beat." The writer went on to praise the singer for producing a "sublime, orgiastic summer anthem."

Kaelen Bell of Exclaim! found Sivan's "horny new single" a "thumping, kinetic dance banger."

Writing for Dork, Stephen Ackroyd called it "a bum-slapping bop" and "the most fun you'll have all summer."

Jason P. Frank of Vulture also found it a "bop,” while thinking it works better with the music video, and added: "This is a song meant for partying through the heat, for doing a substance or two, for turning the dance floor into a make-out sesh."

In an opposing opinion, Vulture's Choire Sicha said his "immediate response was revulsion" upon hearing the song, and listed the particular aspects of "Rush" that the hated the most: "The retro, clumpy high-house chaka-chaka beat; the '70s Village People backup chorus anthem singing; the overproduction of his vocals into pure Jocelynism; the whooshy club bridge sound effect."

“Bop,” huh? Remind me to use that word around my kids when I want to make them cringe.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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