Works in progress: Eric Zorn

 

      Last week I kicked off a new Saturday feature, "Works in progress," where my writer friends talk about what they're doing. My favorite columnist on the Chicago scene — other than myself of course — is Eric Zorn, formerly of the Tribune, lately of the Picayune Sentinel. So it is natural, after Cate Plys got the ball rolling with the complex world of "Roseland, Chicago: 1972," that I'd ask Eric to go next. It's well-timed that it run today, as earlier this week he gave a shout out to EGD on the Picayune that resulted in about 150 new subscribers. So thanks for that, welcome to the new readers, and I'm glad you'll have a familiar voice to help you make the adjustment.

     Enough preface; take it away, Eric:

     I'm pleased and honored that Neil has invited me to contribute an entry to his hobby blog.
     “Hobby blog” is a distant callback – a deep cut – to those who have been following my relationship with Neil over the years, which I date from 1996. I’ve told this story before, but here it is: I was intrigued by the title of a recently-published book by a Sun-Times reporter, “A Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Up, Never-Weres & Total Flops,” so I bought it and took it on a family vacation to Sanibel Island.
     I liked the writing and the journalistic sensibility so much that I called from Florida to leave a complimentary message on Neil’s work machine (this was before email was the dominant mode of communication), and a friendship was born. But we were competitors after the Sun-Times made him a columnist, and would occasionally needle one another in print or online.
    In 2003 I started the Tribune’s first blog, and used it as I use my current platform – a Substack newsletter called The Picayune Sentinel – as a vehicle for little tirades such as one in 2005 under the headline “Steinberg, pimping.”

      I turned on public radio Saturday morning hoping to hear the handwringing, bedwetting liberal blather that so vexes Sun-Times print blogger Neil Steinberg, who picks on NPR in his column almost every chance he gets.
     What did I hear instead? Why, none other than Neil Steinberg himself, flogging his new book yet again in a public radio interview.
     Shameless.
     Ah.
     Recently, Steinberg described himself in print as "brash" and "mouthy," but I felt that description was inexact. Readers helpfully contributed many alternative adjectives – some more complimentary than others.
     But if I must pick just two to replace "brash" and "mouthy," I'll go with "shameless" and "touchy."
     Yet because I am such a fair fellow, I'll note that he's shameless and touchy in a compelling and usually eloquent way.

     Neil responded in print:

     So I was enduring another lecture from Prof. Zorn, not in his newspaper, of course, but in the hobby blog he uses to gusher on at a stridency and a length too tedious even for his Trib column (I tell you, I get bored and skim sometimes, and it's about me.)
     I typically refrain from comment. But this week's tirade was so nagging and unfair that I began to break my rule and leap to my defense. But after a few paragraphs I deleted it all, realizing just in time I was falling into his trap, becoming as petty and prolix as he. And why put you through that? 

     I snapped back:

     OK, here's how it happened.
     I was on a CTA bus today when a stinking wino roused himself from sleep and staggered to the exit, shedding pages of the Chicago Sun-Times that had been covering him during his extended nap.
     And what should fall on my lap but a fetid copy of page 22, the very page upon which Neil Steinberg was feasting on the chum I had thrown into the quaint little shark tank that he calls a column – a column I never, ever would have occasion to look at or read, of course. But there it was. 

     I then quoted the above passage from his column and added:

    He calls this a "hobby blog." It's not. It's formally one-third of my duties here at the Tribune (I used to write three columns a week; now I write two columns plus the Notebook).
And as I've noted before, Steinberg, who spends much of his free time writing books that almost nobody buys and fewer people read than visit this blog in one week, is the last person to accuse anyone of writing for a hobby. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
     He says that he typically refrains from comment, but, in fact, the beautiful thing is that he frequently mentions my name in his column – and always in that brittle tone of superior contempt.
     I never mention his name in my column.
     No, that's not quite true. I did once, July 30, 2003, when I listed him in the company of Chris Rock, Al Franken, Roy Blount Jr., David Sedaris and others who'd made me laugh--in a good way — in the previous year.
     I do mention him here from time to time — sometimes favorably, because I am the bigger person, sometimes critically, because he asks for it — but by no stretch of the imagination is this site about him, as he dreams; not like his old "Bob Watch" column was about Bob Greene.
Where are we? Oh, yes. "Striden(t)....tedious... nagging and unfair...petty and prolix."
     Hey I started the adjective war, I can take it. 

     The towel snapping was all in good fun, though some readers never really got it and thought Neil and I were actually bitter rivals. In truth, I have long considered Neil the most interesting, most gifted newspaper columnist in Chicago – even when I was writing a column of my own.
     You’re a reader of “Every Goddamn Day” so I need not persuade you of this, I’m sure. But as Steinberg fans, you no doubt share certain sensibilities with me – wide ranging curiosity, a tolerance for heterodox takes on the news, a certain fearlessness in shoving sacred cows into the rhetorical abattoir (Neil would have come up with a better metaphor) and a delight in pitilessly examining seemingly insignificant developments in the news.
     If so, I invite you to try the Picayune Sentinel. It arrives in your mailbox just once a week (twice for paid subscribers), not every fuckin’ day, my suggested title for his blog, one that probably would have prompted less pearl clutching. It features takes on the news of the week, a bit of original reporting, funny tweets, highlights from Mary Schmich’s Facebook posts, hot links and other random stuff – often shameless and touchy, I admit, as well as petty and prolix – that I hope readers find diverting.
     I’ve been at it since shortly after leaving the Tribune in mid 2021 and, as I tell people, I’ve never had more fun as a writer. Hope you’ll check it out. Visit https://ericzorn.substack.com/ or you can email me ericzorn@gmail.com and I’ll put you on the list. Put "Steinberg" in the subject line and I'll add a free month, no strings attached, to the Tuesday Picayune Plus editions.

What would you ask Jimmy Carter?

     With Jimmy Carter, 98, in hospice care, the paper asked me to write a reflection on him. I THOUGHT it would run after ... umm ... the inevitable. But there it is posted on the Sun-Times website. Jumping the gun, perhaps, though other news sources are doing the same. Laying the groundwork. Anyway, I thought I should also share it with you here.

 

National Portrait Gallery

   I made Jimmy Carter smile.
     Which at first doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment. The man was famous for his smile. It embodied him. That and peanut farming. A peanut with a big toothy grin was enough to symbolize Carter on campaign pins: No name necessary.
     But I was meeting Carter at a bad moment — eight years out of office after being crushed by Ronald Reagan, in the middle of what had to be a long day of back-to-back press interviews. Promoting a book he’d written with Rosalynn, “Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life.” He was sour, grumpy, talking over his wife when she tried to speak. I remember thinking, “I don’t care if you were the president, you should let her get a few words in.”
     Though Carter really has made the most of the rest of his life. There certainly was enough of it. He was in the Oval Office for four years; he was out of it for 42. (Recently, Carter entered hospice care at his longtime home in Plains, Ga.)
     Nor was his single term as bad as remembered. Carter’s eventual subsequent slide into malaise makes it easy for Americans to forget what a breath of fresh air he had been in the mid-1970s, after the Greek tragedy of Richard Nixon and the bumbling buffoonery of Gerald Ford. Carter was smart — a scientist. I campaigned for him, signing up for the “Carter Impact Team.” The Carter White House sent me Christmas cards the four years he was in office.
     He led by example in office, and his Camp David accords came closer to creating peace in the Middle East than anyone has since.
     All that went wrong by 1979. Between the Iranian hostage crisis, the energy crisis. The botched rescue. For me, voting for Reagan was out of the question — I thought the man was Satan, based on his record as governor of California, shrugging off the death of a student protester, shotgunned by a cop, with, “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed you must expect things will happen.”
     Reagan received 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Third party candidate John Anderson — I threw away my first presidential ballot on him — took 6.6% of the popular vote, meaning that if myself and every single naif who voted for Anderson instead had voted for Carter, Reagan still would have beaten him handily.

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The birds certainly won't care.

      The Sun-Times ran a story on Tuesday about how the Chicago Audubon Society is dropping the name of its inspiration, John James Audubon, because the famed artist owned slaves and believed various strands of nonsense that were popular in the early 19th century. They didn't say what the new name will be: The Chicago Bird Lovers Society, maybe. They also urge the national Audubon Society to do the same.

      I'm sincerely conflicted when it comes to this sort of thing. On one hand, times change and we change with them.  Language changes. We don't have asylums for the criminally insane, or schools for poor orphans, or that sort of thing.  Out with the old, in with the new.

     Values change. Blind obedience to authority was once drilled in our children. Now, not so much.

     That said, the idea of purging those morally tainted by residing in the past — it's always low-hanging fruit. They never say, you know, this Jesus Christ, when we tote up all the harm done in his name, geez, it's second only to disease. Let''s shitcan him. Actually, I could get behind that. But no. Instead they go after Audubon, wandering the pristine forests of our nascent country with his boxes of paints and his "Bird of America." It isn't a show of strength, but of weakness. 

      And yet. Why not show a bad man the gate. The Audubon Society, in the second paragraph of their biography of the organization's namesake, unleashes this:

It’s fair to describe John James Audubon as a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist, and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge. His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day. He was contemporaneously and posthumously accused of — and most certainly committed — both academic fraud and plagiarism. But far worse, he enslaved Black people and wrote critically about emancipation. He stole human remains and sent the skulls to a colleague who used them to assert that whites were superior to non-whites.

     So there it is. Obviously the national Audubon Society plans to try to skate by on candor. And there is an argument that being named after Audubon embeds this grim history into their story where it might be found, to the benefit of those who know more bird lore than human history. Join for birds, get a lesson in the loathsome side of early 19th century America. To me, that is a good thing, and the best argument against this kind of makeover. Plus some of those crimes weigh heavier on him than others. Martin Luther King was also a serial plagiarist. Yet he gets by.
     It isn't as if the 435 life-size plates in "Birds of America" are being pushed into a drawer, to strike a tardy blow against their creator. Not yet anyway. Maybe that's next. Revive the idea of degenerate art. You already see it regarding Paul Gauguin. Whitewashing the name is a step in that direction: it seems to me healthier to live with difficult truths, not hide them. But I also get there is honor in naming a society, and John James Audubon has already received honor aplenty. More than he deserves, in realms apart from glorious paintings of birds. 
      

Ukraine war to be a long haul

Ruined bridge after the Battle of Bull Run, 1862 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Friday, it will be one year since Vladimir Putin sent his Russian army crashing into Ukraine.
     An unmitigated disaster all too familiar to most. An act of unprovoked aggression conducted to boost the massive ego of an autocrat, the invasion was supposed to be quick and easy. Instead, one year on, it has been terrible for Russia — 200,000 casualties, freedoms scuttled, their country turned into a pariah state.
     Worse of course for Ukraine: thousands of civilians dead, cities ruined, economy wrecked. If the war ended now, it would take years to rebuild. Though there is no sign of the war ending now, or anytime soon. It could go on for years.
     Are we ready for that? America and her NATO allies stepped up quickly and decisively in response to the assault, providing armament and expertise to the Ukrainians while managing to stay out of the war itself, so far. Joe Biden just made a daring trip to Kyiv this week to demonstrate American resolve to stem Russian aggression.
     Good for now. What about the long haul? With Republican leaders like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis boosting Russia and the rest of the country’s famously short attention span, how do we keep focused on what will be an expensive, long-term commitment?
     The way to do it is to do it, and I admire how veteran Chicago broadcaster Bob Sirott has woven Ukraine into his morning show on WGN AM 720.
     “Let’s check in with Joseph Lindsley in Ukraine,” Sirott will say, handing his podium over to an American reporter who moved there in 2020, just in time for a ringside seat at the calamity.

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Ducks and geese.

     We saw a magnificent hawk soaring directly above our heads when we first entered the Chicago Botanic Garden Sunday. For a moment I thought it might be an eagle — it was that big, and seemed to have a white head. But then I saw the distinctive brown markings on its wings. A hawk.

     Soon we were debating whether certain birds far in the distance on the water were ducks, or geese.
     We walked. A thought grew.
     "Do you know..." I began, "that, in nature, there is a strict ratio for ducks and geese?"
     My wife chewed on that a moment.
     "Is this the set-up to a joke?" she asked.
     Damn. Busted. I used to be so good at this. I told her that, yes, it was. Then I told her what the joke would have been, had she not ruined it. She admired its primitive beauty.
     "I should have let you play it out," she said, regretfully.
     "Yeah."
     But my wife, like a skilled jazz musician, picked up the refrain of the thwarted joke and riffed upon it anyway.
     "Because then, you could have said, 'I learned about it in nursery school," she continued.
     I didn't immediately see where she was going with this.
     "And then I would be impressed that you still remember it, after all these years."
     I nodded, realization dawning.
     "And you would say, 'The ratio is very simple. It goes, 'Duck. Duck. Goose.' Then repeats."
      I know I'll be living to tell it to someone someday. Or you are free to use it as your own on some future occasion.
     Assuming there is anyone else in the world who might want to.
     Which there probably isn't. We are a particularly well-suited couple, having grown into each other like a pair of old oaks leaning against each other.

     On Monday, we were back in the garden — we go there a lot. We found ourselves standing before a mixed group of ducks and geese. Mostly the latter.

     "You're wrong," she observed.

     I knew exactly what she was talking about.

   

Cut your bitterness with cookies

     Elmhurst lures; it entices. Even on an ordinary day, just driving down 294, going somewhere else, it takes an act of will to pass by Elmhurst.
     I see that green “ELMHURST” exit sign and have to fight the urge to pull off and hurry over to Lezza Spumoni & Desserts on Spring Road and ... well, it’s embarrassing. Stock up on mind-blowing spumoni and little white boxes of powder-sugar-kissed cannoli and big white boxes of biscotti and lemon knots and wedding cookies.
     So when I heard that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is scheduled to speak in Elmhurst on Monday — talk about a fish out of water story — the urge to head to Elmhurst is strong.
     But head over where? Yes, Elmhurst, but it’s big, for a little place. The problem, of course, is not only are journalists not invited to the Floridian fascist’s jamboree, but the public isn’t invited either.
     DeSantis nudged Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7 cappo John Catanzara, who discreetly invited his buddies to gather somewhere in Elmhurst to listen to the Sunshine State Savonarola. Who, if he stays true to form, will be heaping abuse on the far right’s designated villains of the moment: trans people, history teachers and whoever makes up the stuffed tackling dummy of their midnight fears.
     Hence the secrecy. I like to think they’re privately ashamed — it’s the optimist in me. But the more likely motivation is it just won’t do to have the very untermenschen you are trying to purge from both the present and the past show up at your lawn party to wave signs and express their disapproval of your brand of backwater demagoguery.
     Not that a protest is really necessary: The bare fact that DeSantis can safely expect the Chicago Police Department to show up en masse, to nod solemnly at the woes they are forced to endure by living in a society that tolerates those other than themselves, is condemnation aplenty. That Chicago police can be relied upon to cheer Trump 2.0 on is an indictment of the CPD culture more eloquent than 100 liberals could dream up.

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Email of the week

The reality doesn't change, so I try not to get hung up on terminology.

     Not every email is a criticism. Some readers bring up valid issues or ask legitimate questions, and I try to answer them honestly. On Friday, the paper ran a story I had contributed to, using my contacts among social service agencies to add remarks about homeless people living at O'Hare. Art G. sent an email whose subject line was "'unhoused' vs 'homeless'" and whose entire message was a succinct:"Why is one word okay and not the other?" I thought for a moment, then replied:

     My experience is that the words get randomly changed from time to time in a futile attempt to shake off the negative associations that gather around negative conditions. So "crippled" becomes "handicapped" becomes "disabled" becomes "special needs" becomes "otherly-abled," etc. Changing the terms, or trying to, also gives people facing difficult situations a way to create the illusion of power and progress. I try to stay ahead of the curve so as to avoid needless agita. Thanks for writing.

     It's a bigger issue than you would imagine. In talking to a social service, also Friday, for a future story, one that involves access being granted and scheduled visits and lots of time invested, I told them that while I am sensitive to the current style, I'm not a slave to it, and if you go too far in to the buzzword of the moment, readers don't know what you're talking about and, worse, laugh at you. I told her about the "Face Fear" story I did for Mosaic, the London medical website. They were reluctant to use the word "disfigured" preferring some euphemism, "different in appearance" or some such thing. My position was that nobody is tormented on the playground merely for looking "different," and that the danger is we minimize the lived experience of people. We ended up with a compromise: I used the word as little as possible. A few readers still complained. But the bottom line is I don't write for activists or fanatics, but for some imaginary average person, who benefits by describing what we're talking about in plain words. If you don't, you do things like take a perfectly good name like "Chicago Rehab Institute" and turning it into the "Shirley Ryan AbilityLab," which sounds like a room at the Kohler Children's Museum where kids put on plastic aprons and play with water and white PVC pipes.