Despite the cuts and the drama, Twitter is still the most dynamic network in my social media palette. Facebook smells of mothballs, and is practically the day room in a senior center. Instagram an addictive chain of mesmerizing yet ultimately empty snippets of TV shows and car crashes. Email is clogged with spam and all but useless. Only Twitter can bring you both the news of the day and the doings of your friends.
Twitter even has rare small moments of — dare I say it? — grace. Saturday night, Chicago TikTok historian Shermann Dilla Thomas, whom we met in April taking his bus tour of Bronzeville, tossed out a question to Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Yes, wisenheimers fired off cracks like "Queen Victoria?" (okay, that was me. In my defense, it was a sly historical reference to the fact that, when Chicago burned in in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, sympathetic English literary lights, including Queen Victoria, donated books to replace the ones that weren't lost in the library we didn't have. The arrival of the donated British books shamed the city into finally establishing a public library. I hadn't realized that the Pritzkers went back that far in Chicago history).
The question alone would have been charming, in "a cat can look at a king" fashion. Then the governor, unperturbed by being addressed as "big homie," actually chimed in, or at least some aide posing as him did, tweeting to Dilla:
I had no idea what the governor was talking about. Cindy Pritzker had a hand in founding the Chicago Public Library? Since when? There is a Cindy Pritzker Auditorium in the Harold Washington Library. But that doesn't reach the level of helping to create the library system, not in the usual sense of the term. It's a room.
After conducting seconds of research online, I realize the true situation. Cindy Pritzker "and a core group of civic leaders" created the Chicago Public Library Foundation, which puts the squeeze on private donors to help fund the Chicago Public Library system.
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| Shermann Dilla Thomas |
It's like asking the identity of Spider Man, and someone volunteers the name of their 2-year-old because he's wearing Spider Man underpants.
Now had Dilla asked if the governor — who, I should say, is generally doing a bang-up job keeping Illinois running and preserving it as a human rights sanctuary, secure from the right wing repression deepening in states around us — if he has a relative who helped support the library, I'd have no qualm. But "helped create"? No way. It might seem like a fine point. But details matter, particularly in history. Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War, true, but the American Civil War. Not the one in England in the 1640s. There's a difference.
To summarize what we've learned: Cindy Pritzker didn't help create the Chicago Public Library, not being alive at the time. She came along a century afterward, with nameless others, and set up a fundraising arm of the CPL. Her nephew giving her credit for starting the system is like me claiming to have begun Misericordia because I once bought a box of heart-shaped brownies.
And people say history isn't fun!
Honestly, the governor's misunderstanding (or deception) makes this even more of an archetypical Twitter moment. A heart-warming exchange between a sincere ComEd worker turned history maven with the governor of Illinois that also happens to be factually incorrect.
Honestly, the governor's misunderstanding (or deception) makes this even more of an archetypical Twitter moment. A heart-warming exchange between a sincere ComEd worker turned history maven with the governor of Illinois that also happens to be factually incorrect.
Later, I asked Dilla — on Twitter, the easiest way to do these things — why he had asked the governor about the library in the first place. He replied, "I plan to do a 150th anniversary thing for CPL and was just checking facts I had heard." He'll do well to keep in mind that "facts" and "Twitter" are not natural bedfellows. Particularly when it comes to the claims of politicians — or, I imagine, the claims of their 28-year-old social media staffers who don't intuitively understand the difference between a system and a foundation. Let's leave self-aggrandizing untruths to the Republicans.
It seems that Elon is our new Howard Hughes
ReplyDeleteAs I drive around down state, a day doesn't go by that I don't see a "Pritzker Sucks!" sign. It's always in the front yard of a house signifying a working class presence, the kind of a house inhabited by people without a pension or health insurance in Red States. The greatest accomplishment in American propaganda history is how the GOP and it's enablers have convinced rural working Americans to vote against their own self interests. Actually, they don't just vote against their own self interests, but have also been trained to demonize and hate the people who have their interests in mind. The horror.
ReplyDeletePotato, potatoe? It's Twitter after all. Sherman, whom I admire greatly, would have been better off using Wikipedia. And Pritzker tried to accommodate him by at least providing relevant information.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. In my defense, I started the post just wanting to amplify what I thought was the cool response of the governor, then got sucked down the history rathole. I tried not to come off as harsh, but I can be heavy-handed. Dilla, I should say, being the complete stand up guy he is, took responsibility when I told him that I didn't mean to cast shade in his direction: "History needs to be correct. I just must have misheard is all. He and I were talking at an event and he probably said Foundation and I heard something else." He's going to be a star someday, if he isn't already.
DeleteThanks for taking the time to reply, Neil! I enjoy all your columns. Happy Memorial Day to you!
DeleteOkay, there ya go: Dropping one key word ("Foundation") from the question being asked of the governor introduced a series of misunderstandings.
DeleteI have the impression that the governor knew what Dilla was referring to, based on the prior conversation between the two of them at an event Dilla did not mention in his initial post, only revealing it to you later on. Pritzker's (very) short reply of "My Aunt Cindy!" is not the sort of thing a staffer would toss off on the spur of the moment; I envision the Governor's own thumbs on the keyboard for that one.
Let me wander into generalities here: I'm not a Twitter fan myself, but it's a great example of our modern ability to reach out and contact people who for various reasons would have been completely unreachable or unattainable in the past, and get a direct response in minutes if they feel like answering. Granted, any new topic or posting quickly devolves into a cesspool of trolling and insults back and forth, but it's the basic concept of instant communication between virtually anyone that was unimaginable in our earlier years.
"He and I were talking at an event and he probably said Foundation and I heard something else."
DeleteThat really puts the exchange in a different light, to me. As Andy alluded to, it's not like the Gov probably spent a few minutes pondering the wording of either Dilla's tweet or considering his reply. If they'd talked about this before, he just thought he was reminding him of what had been said already.
But Dilla also tweeted that "I thought he has a distant relative that helped get the money out of Springfield way back when… This is dope too though," so some clarification certainly was appropriate.
Yes you're harsh . And a bit of a douchebag but I don't hold that against you
ReplyDeleteOkay, so Facebook is for geezers. It got co-opted by aging Boomers years ago, according to what I've heard from other people, and the criticisms I've read. So why the hell are we both there, Mr. S? Why? Because...we are what we are. You'll soon turn 63, and I'll soon be 76. Okay, Boomers...
ReplyDeleteIm my case, it was simply surrender. I strongly resisted the guzzling of Zuckhead's Kool-Aid for at least fifteen years. Then, during the Plague years, I got what probably amounted to lifetime bans from both Nextdoor and the Washington Post. So I finally capitulated, and joined FB in '21...mainly to find local tradespeople for my aging bunglow, and to keep up with neighborhood events and happenings.
But I quickly got sucked down into the FB swamp. I don't do the friending (hate that term). Or the announcements of what I'm "doing" or what I had for lunch. Or the looking up of old classmates. Hell, I don't even talk to relatives. I began joining more and more groups that shared my passions and hobbies and interests, which did result in making my FB a senior day room. More like a back-in-the-day room, actually.
There are just so many FB groups whose sole purpose is either American history or Boomer nostalgia, and little more. Mourning the lost and vanished and forgotten Chicago of our youth. Classic TV shows. American streetcars and trains. Wrigley before the lights. American culture in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. The Chicago hippie scene in the 60s and 70s. You can almost smell the incense and the weed....and see the groovy front pages of the Chicago Seed.
But no politics. That's a rabbit hole not worth exploring. Just one big pissing contest that nobody wins and everybody loses, and where you just end up cold, wet, and covered with...well...never mind. Birds tweet...I don't. Maybe I should. But I'm probably too long-winded for Twitter.
Blogs (like EGD) are more my speed. And messageboards. But they have gone the way of the pay phone. My last one just pulled the plug, after an amazing run that lasted for 19 years. The proprietor died...and so did too many other fine folks. That's what eventually happens in all those Real Life senior day rooms, doncha know.
To deconstruct the answer while accepting the question unquestionably seems a bit lazy. Is Dilla responding to a claim by the governor, being a smart ass, or making a veiled allegation? I would guess a combination of the first two. The response seems light enough to include one of the too numerous smiley face emojis, not a claim of founding the Library. Despite Toiletgate, I'd guess the Pritzkers have been more charitable than most, even deserving praise for inducing others to pitch in.
ReplyDeleteSometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
DeleteDilla is newer to the swimming pool of Twitter toads and sharks.
I doubt Dilla expected a response from the guv himself; I honestly think he was looking for clarification to add to his knowledge base. I give Dilla the benefit of any doubt as his Chicago tours have been vetted and approved by the blog host as a genuine good addition to the Chicago scene.
IMHO there is nothing inherently “wrong” with Twitter, Facebook, or any other type of social media; it is what we make of it.
ReplyDeleteWhat I fear more is “what we (may) have here is a failure to communicate”.
SandyK