Farewell to Scott Adams

     Seventeen years is a long time for a cartoon to hang on your wall. Or door, now. It's shifted over the years. But that's how I roll. I'm looking at a photo of a woebegone beagle that has been tacked over my desk for at least 30. "Terrifying Effect of Unprofessional Environment" is the caption. No idea if the point was ever conveyed to its intended audience in the decades it was displayed in my office downtown. 

     As for the above Scott Adams cartoon, as someone frequently chided by readers, this one spoke to me, and my truism that most people who offer corrections are themselves mistaken.
     That last panel, where the irked reader shifts into false accusations of hating minorities, never really factored into the joke. Now it seems ominous. Oh, I knew Adams had become an increasingly strident right wing asshat. But I try to separate the work from the person. Wagner was a jerk too. So what?
     That all blew up last week when the cartoonist went on a tirade in the wake of a poll that purports to show that about half of Black people disagree with the statement, "It's okay to be white." Which itself is fairly meaningless, first because the poll taker, Rasmussen, has a reputation as being biased and inaccurate, presenting questions in a way to shore up right wing talking points. Only a hater or an idiot or both would put any kind of significance on that.

     Because even if the poll were accurate, what would it mean? The question is vague enough, and the key missing data is how white people would respond to a similar question. One essence of racism is to fault a particular group for exhibiting flaws that you yourself possess. People like Adams, the boo-hoo-white-people-have-it-so-bad crowd, think they're refuting racism, when in fact they're manifesting it.
     Anyway, the result was Adams being cashiered at hundreds of major newspapers, including, eventually, the Chicago Tribune. Which is not a particular loss to cartooning — "Dilbert" had long passed its sell-by date, particularly after COVID stripped offices of their workers. I can't vouch for how Adams reacted to the pandemic, since I stopped reading it years ago. But if he kept to desk-bound wage slaves sparring with their nincompoop bosses, well, that's like those single "Grin and Bear It" gags the Sun-Times runs where men in fedoras sit at bars and gripe. Times change. I used to love the comics. 
     I spoke with Adams once, now that I think of it. He did some strip I really liked — not the one above — and I thought I'd try to get the original. I have drawings from everyone from Matt Groening to Bill Mauldin, James Thurber to Mort Walker, Joe Martin to Pat Brady. Somehow, cartoonists seem more approachable — I'd never ask John McPhee for a manuscript page. Maybe because of their association with journalism. 
    Adams was nice, but explained that he doesn't actually draw "Dilbert," just assembles it on a computer screen from stock images. Which made me shiver, and think of how Charles Schulz dismissed the thought of somebody else lettering his wildly remunerative strip with, "That would be like Arnold Palmer hiring someone to do his putts." 
     All people are biased, by the way, all people of all colors and religions. Every single one of us, to a greater or lesser degree. A person can recognize that without falling weeping onto a sofa, clutching at oneself, as Adams did. The mistake he and those like him make is that they consider being called out on their biases a form of oppression. They think they're victims, suffering from the category error belief that squelching hate speech violates their First Amendment rights. Which might carry some truth were the government doing it. But there is no amendment to the constitution requiring newspapers to run the cartoons of clueless bigots. I decided 17 years is plenty, gently pulled the cartoon off my door so as not to damage the paint, tore it into small pieces and tossed it in the trash.

Punch ticket, grab book

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport

     The Bangkok to Chicago flight was about to board. Our hero shuffled toward the gate, exhausted after three weeks away from home, pinballing across Japan and Thailand. A terrible realization dawned:
     It’s a 14-hour flight to O’Hare. And he ... had nothing ... to read. Acting on instinct, he bolted into a small gift shop, spun a black wire rack. With experienced fingers he deftly plucked up “The Cardinal of the Kremlin” by Tom Clancy.
     That book saved my life. I’d have gone mad otherwise. It was also the last thriller I read until Wednesday, when I was rushing out the door, toward a long weekend in Washington, D.C. The cab was out front. “Oh a book!” I thought, grabbing “Shadow State” by Frank Sennett.
     Why that book and not, oh, “Theogony Works and Days Testimonia” by Hesiod, also waiting to be read? First, “Shadow State” was published last week. Second, Sennett is a Chicago author, longtime journalist, now mellowed into public relations. We had lunch once.
     As someone who left nine books on the doorsteps of many a media acquaintance who just shrugged and let them die there, squalling, ignored, I feel a moral obligation to at least start any book sent my way. To read the first page. Usually the first page is plenty. Most books are crap.
     “Shadow State” isn’t crap. I kept reading. There’s no choice.

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Do work, get paid.

     For years I was general assignment reporter. My schedule was Sunday through Thursday. Which meant I went to a lot of church services, on Sundays. Fridays were my day off. One Friday, when I lived on Logan Boulevard, I was heading to the health club, one hand holding my gym bag, the other on the doorknob, when I heard the phone ring inside the apartment.
     "Don't answer it," I thought. "Just leave."
     I went back inside and picked up the phone. Being a reporter is a responsibility, almost a calling, that transcends clocks and schedules. It was the paper, of course, telling me to get over to Christ Hospital right now. The Tribune was unleashing some big piece on trauma centers Monday and we were going to try to steal their thunder — spend 24 hours in Christ's ER, write it up Sunday, hit the newsstands at the same time. I was expected to produce the same story in two days that the Trib probably had four reporteres spend a month preparing. That's how the Sun-Times rolls: lean, mean, by the seat of our pants. A trust drop into the dedication and professional of its employees.
     "Okay," I said. 
     Spending 24 hours at Christ on my day off meant, the way our comp time system works, that I would earn 36 hours, almost a full week, of time due — vacation I could take when I like. That struck me as a fair trade for spending my Friday night unexpectedly watching gunshot victims writhe in agony, having to avoid being splashed with blood, and catching a quick catnap on a stainless steel gurney in a brightly lit unused operating room, wondering, idly as I drifted off, whether I would awake to someone sawing off my leg.
     Now imagine that I wasn't contractually assured that eventual time off. Imagine I wasn't confident I would be compensated at all, at least not any more than my usual week's salary. That changes the story, doesn't it? That affects whether I step back into the apartment to pick up the phone or continue with my carefree weekend. It injects a corrosive element of doubt and disrespect. How can you give your all to an organization that doesn't give its all back to you? 

     A question that keeps poking me in the shoulder while watching the new Sun-Times management dicker concerning overtime, and other contractual fine points, during our union negotiations, which drag on. Sun-Times reporters and photographers have been  guaranteed overtime since 1945 (when the paper was just the Sun). Now it's an issue. To even float the idea that overtime might be watered down, seems ... ominous. Get paid for the work you do, and paid more if you are asked to do more — not a very radical concept. 

     Progress is being made, and I don't want to bite the hand that feeds us. Yet. Maybe gum a few digits, as practice, because this is taking longer than it should, and the guild is slowly, gradually, turning up the pressure, reminding the people that a certain organization presenting itself over the airwaves as responsible and thoughtful and concerned and caring about all people everywhere is, behind the scenes, is alternating between dragging its feet and playing iron glove hardball when it comes to giving their employees a fair deal. Which is doubly strange, because the main reason that Chicago Public Media snatched up the Sun-Times (in addition to gaining access to our far more popular online platform) was to tap this ocean of charitable giving by people who want both organizations to endure, even thrive, despite the Great Media Die-Off. Some $60 million, right? It's like winning the lottery and then stiffing the paperboy.
     When I first joined the Sun-Times, I gave a wide berth to union activities. First because it was a union grievance that got me hired in the first place — I freelanced so much, they considered me a scab, so I walked in the door a dubious figure, corrupted by magazine work.  And second, due to my big mouth, I was unpopular enough with management without also establishing myself as a union firebrand. Which I might be doing now, unwisely. Maybe I should have stuck to that strategy but honestly, I'm entering into stage of life where there just isn't as much to lose.  I got mine, enjoyed a long career at a good job with good benefits. I can't sit on my hands now while the next generation gets the shaft. 
     This round, for the first time, I signed up as a union shop steward. A role of minimal responsibility — I have to keep other columnists informed of what is going on — but that duty  requires me to at least keep abreast of how negotiations are proceeding. And I've been disappointed. First, at the agree-right-now-or-we'll-sic-Jones-Day-on-your-ass attitude that management assumed right off the bat. That's not how it works. They're called "negotiations" because, well, you negotiate. Otherwise it's just demands being flung. 

      And second, the way they're playing with the benefits for new hires. Which is doubly objectionable because at the same time they're  patting themselves on the back for their attempts to encourage staff diversity. The idea seems to be to quietly create a new set of performance hoops and then lure underrepresented employees to try to leap through them. A bad mix I have dubbed, "Welcome people of color and then fuck 'em."

     This isn't my first rodeo. Both sides talk tough, scare each other. The talks seem to go on forever and at the last moment, with the newsroom putting on their coats to walk out the door, the clocks are stopped, the brass tacks gotten down to, and an agreement is signed that everyone likes, sort of, and we all breathe a deep sigh of relief and go back to the work we love. I fully expect that to happen again. At least I hope it will. Any moment now.

     In the meantime, we need to remember why jobs at the Sun-Times ought to be great jobs. To attract great people. Who'll create great journalism. To benefit a great city. Chicago deserves no less.
    

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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