President Pritzker? Stranger things have happened

Also: Useful information about handbaskets and idioms

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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.

I’m traveling this week — more about that in the Thursday issue. But my correspondents have provided much food for fodder, as Ben Bentley used to say.

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

Some of these messages are in reference to items in last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel.

Rick W. — With apologies for my cultural illiteracy, I don’t get the entry in the Tweet of the Week contest that read, “I was told there would be a handbasket.” I must really be out of it. Can you enlighten me?

William Safire tackled the idiom, “going to hell in a handbasket” in his New York Times column 32 years ago:

The origin is believed to be “to heaven in a handbasket,” a locution that Dialect Notes spotted in 1913 in Kansas, where it was taken to mean ''to have a sinecure.'' One who was nicely ensconced in an untouchable job was said to be on the way to heaven in a handbasket. When used in Wisconsin a decade later, the term was defined as ''to do something easily.''

Then the direction changed. The alliteration remained the same, but the first stage of this rocket dropped off and was lost in the sea of archaic phrases; the second stage, with hell substituted for heaven, took us to where we are today: the meaning is ''to degenerate rapidly; to fall apart suddenly.'' …

What is it about a handbasket — a word rarely used now outside the hellish phrase — that makes it so useful in talk of decadence, degeneration, declension and downfall?

The key quality is portability; the basket is small enough to be carried in one hand, and anything in it is little or light. From a couple of centuries after its coinage, the word lent itself to belittlement in phrasemaking: In the play ''Juliana, or the Princess of Poland'' by John Crowne in 1671, a character says, ''I can see when I see, surely; I don't carry my eyes in a hand-basket.''

In later years, of course, the handbasket has been replaced by the fanny pack.

P.P. — If allowing quotes to be clarified is bad journalism, then, well, I'm bad at it, too.

S.C. — As a journalist myself, I often interview experts and email them the quotes I want to use to ensure that I've transcribed them correctly, since I don't record them, and to offer them the chance to amend, clarify or otherwise improve what they said. I wouldn't do it, of course, to spare a politician from the embarrassment of saying something stupid or controversial. But doing it for experts seems to me to serve readers. Am I mistaken?

No, and I’d guess that in the future these experts would be more inclined to return your messages and offer you the benefit of their wisdom, thus improving the quality of your work.

Steve R. — Most regular people, including me, who have ever been interviewed have found, when reading the final product, at least one misrepresentation of what they said to the interviewer. It is easy to paraphrase a comment and completely change the gist of it, either accidentally or on purpose. There should be more of a focus on accuracy and truth, and less on gotcha.

On the rare occasions when I was accused of misquoting someone it was rooted in a claim that I misunderstood and therefore misrepresented a comment. And I was guilty in some cases. In other cases, though, I suspected that complainers simply regretted saying what they had said or how they had said it and were trying to insulate themselves from the consequences. Either way, I can assure you that no responsible journalist ever wants to misquote someone.

Andrew Herrmann, the former Sun-Times managing editor whose tweet at me prompted the item, responded on Twitter to last week’s newsletter:

Interesting discussion. For the record, since you mentioned my own career as a reporter, all the ground rules I set in interviewing public figures were before the interview — “I’ll talk about this but not this” — but none ever included “you can edit your own quotes.” Because who gets that privilege? How do you decide? I don’t think Rob had anything to hide. He’s honorable and upfront from my experiences. But would you give it to … Lightfoot? Pritzker? How about in the media world…Hannity? What people dismiss as “gotcha” journalism is often someone speaking frankly and in a revealing way they wish they hadn’t said out loud. But it is revealing. I’m not sure the general public even cares about this. They see journalists now as advocates for one side or another. But you have a lot of journos as readers and I wanted to air this so they don’t think allowing sources to edit their comments is just “unusual.”

If you never had a source say “this is all off the record and when we’re done we can circle back and decide what you can quote me as saying” then you were very lucky. I can think of only one or two instances where the ground rules a prospective subject insisted upon went so far that I declined to do the interview. When subjects insisted they would not be quoted but would speak to me only off the record, I occasionally said, “off the record does me no good” and hoped for a counteroffer (which usually didn’t come).

When interviewing someone for a news story or feature I would not offer quote approval, though I would sometimes choose to read back quotes to be sure my notes and my understanding was perfectly accurate.

There are times when sources agree to answer questions only in writing, which is more or less equivalent to giving them quote approval. Some journalistic purists say reporters should refuse to accept written answers and deny the source the opportunity to comment.

I disagree.

If you were to contact J.B. Pritzker’s office and ask him if his upcoming appearance in Florida signals his interest in running for president in 2024 and if Pritzker were to reply that he would only provide written answers, you are ethically bound to use that answer in your story the same way you would an answer he gave you in a chat over the phone. News consumers could then make what they will of the fact that it was a written statement.

Jim B. — In a 40 plus year career, Robert Feder did a remarkable job. He was without peer. His departure leaves a void in daily coverage. Neither paper has it. Shame on them. To that effect, I wrote to Tribune Editorial Page Editor Chris Jones and told him that he should give Robert Channick a media column.

I agree that the void is palpable and that Chicago ought to have at least one full-time media columnist. Channick is a reporter in the business section who writes frequently about media and would be a good choice, but he doesn’t report to Jones. You want to write with your suggestion to the paper’s editor, Mitch Pugh — mpugh@chicagotribune.com. I added him as a subscriber to the Sentinel this week so maybe he’ll see this.

Mike N. — You wrote that “we are seeing 50 years of history unraveling when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. How long will majority factions quietly take the insult of policy decisions forced on them by a minority?"

Yet, I expect that you had no problem whatsoever when an (unelected) minority on the Supreme Court undid the statutes of a majority of the states based merely on their personal feelings and certainly not on any notion of constitutional law. I also see that, in Illinois at least, a majority faction has already enacted a statute protecting such reproductive rights (as some call them), to the detriment of the entity (a "fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus" as the law holds, or life, dare I say) in the womb.

So it seems, you have little to thunder about whereas I, being in the minority faction, will do my level best to quit this pathetic state for friendlier climes as soon as my affairs are in order. I'd rather live in a slave state than one that permits abortion. The slavers, vicious and miserable creatures that they were, at least had the common sense (for the most part anyway) not to kill their chattels.

I just don’t think it should be your business or mine or a bunch of state legislators’ whether a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should remain pregnant. And, clearly, many legal scholars feel that a broad reading of the Constitution ought to enshrine her right to choose, as the Supreme Court largely did 50 years ago.

The overall situation is that we have a dominant majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that holds views and exercises judicial philosophies that are at odds with the views and philosophies of most Americans. This is an artifact of the undemocratic structure of our republic and the odious unfairness of the Electoral College system, and is inherently destabilizing.

Good luck in your move to Gilead! I wonder if your grandsons and granddaughters will join you there or if they will choose a state that offers significantly more personal autonomy.

Marc M. —The idea that abortion laws will cause a major change in domestic migration trends is wishful thinking. The trends have been strongly to the south for a long time and dramatically so since 2019. So the bad news is that the 'bad actors' will not be soundly and promptly punished. And the good news is that the demographics of the electorate in those states is changing and will likely see a shift towards the center. There are always people that are strongly motivated by individual aspects of places, but most are making a decision based on the aggregate of high importance factors.

Cassidy K. — So many factors are in play when people are deciding where to attend school, work, retire and so on that I seriously doubt abortion laws will cause population shifts noticeable enough to impact legislatures or corporate leaders looking to relocate.

I’m sure we’ll see. A sample size of one, my wife, says she doesn’t even want to vacation in restrictive abortion states, which currently threatens our regular sojourn to the True-False documentary film festival in Columbia, Missouri.

Axios/Generation labs released a poll last Wednesday of 843 Americans ages 18-29 that found this:

Steve T. — Don’t be miffed about the lack of response for your “can we have you liver, then?” tweet. The reference was hopelessly obscure for most. I’m a huge Monty Python (personal favorites: Philosopher Football and Four Yorkshiremen sketches), saw the film, but still whiffed on it. Then again, I did grow up in a shoebox in the motorway and was fed a lump of freezing cold poison every morning.

You were lucky to have a shoebox!

Jonathan L. — I agree that guns capable of outgunning the police should be more heavily restricted or banned, but would note that for some in the gun rights community, ability to outgun the police is a feature, not a bug. The idea that people need the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government by force of arms really cannot mean anything else. It doesn't mean shooting at the federal buildings downtown. It means political assassination and shooting such people as soldiers, police officers, and one's loyalist neighbors. And it means empowering each person to do so whenever their personal threshold of "tyranny" has been met. Of all the defenses of gun rights, this one may be the most insane and repugnant.

Jane — Eric, this week, and every once in a while in the past, I didn’t get the Picayune Sentinel in my email. I had to track it down on Safari. Not sure why that happens but thought you should know. Thinking this is the second time over the publishing period, and I am a paid subscriber. I checked my trash ( just in case I accidentally dumped it) and junk mail. Not in either.

I’m not sure what the issues are with Substack’s mailing program and if it’s connected somehow to filters in email programs. Sometimes people tell me they find issues tagged as spam or junk, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I’m really sorry you’re having trouble and I’ll raise this issue with Substack. Issues are always posted here.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

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

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

they make an excellent point

an anxious panda 🫧🍑 @thehubrispanda

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Dead Pan Nick @Contwixt

Found a job I want

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

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

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