This interview never happened

     What does “off the record” mean?
     My understanding is, it means you aren’t going to quote someone. That whatever conversation you have is only meant to improve your understanding of a situation. Or person. Otherwise, what would be the point of ever having an off-the-record conversation?
     Still, even though I’ve been in this business 40 years, I don’t traffic in hard news much, and there are details of the off-the-record tradition I’m uncertain about. Can you even say the conversation occurred? That 45 minutes were spent sitting in a certain office on the 5th floor of City Hall last Halloween, talking to a particular elected official who, shall we say, didn’t have the best week? I believe I can.
     Can I mention what I said? I wasn’t off the record. I made some suggestions. How about talking about the challenge of being a mother while running one of the largest cities in the United States? “It might humanize you,” is what I actually said. Tact, not my strong suit. I prefer to think of it as being blunt.
     Officials sometimes try to slip a shiv, anonymously, into their adversaries without leaving any fingerprints. “A high city official said...” It’s also a fig leaf for the frightened. If you don’t trust yourself, or anyone else, or if you are so thin-skinned you can’t risk that anything you say that might be held in an unflattering light.
     Elected officials are sometimes torn between seeking the attention they crave and receiving the scrutiny they shun.

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Flashback 2000: Do-good effort won't do any good

 

The Triumph of Fame, by Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   Did you wake up Wednesday morning with a wincing unease that could be unwound as, "Gee, I'm glad Lori Lightfoot lost. But Paul Vallas? Really? He's the best we've got?"

      Thinking to ward off this sour feeling with information, I plunged into the archive, looking for what I've written about Vallas. The short answer is: not much. A reformer turned hired gun traveling bureaucrat, he was good at signing pledges like the one mocked below.  A pledge that Vallas blithely violated, at least the "I will discourage all forms of prejudice by others at every opportunity" clause, when he allowed the caustic Fraternal Order of Police to climb into bed with him without a murmur of protest. The fact that Vallas felt obligated to put some daylight between himself and Gov. Ron DeSantis when the Florida fascist came to town says everything. I like to think this all means Chicago will welcome Mayor Brandon Johnson come May. But if we've learned anything, it's that we minimize the Aggrieved White Person vote at our peril.

   
     Chicago is the most segregated city in America. They leave that off the brochures. No Southern backwater ever managed to balkanize the races as completely as Chicago has, first as a matter of official policy, and now as lingering tradition.
     So it was with more than the usual weary, ironic reporter's smile that I tore open an envelope from the city this morning and found my very own copy of the "Metropolitan Chicago Pledge," the Commission on Human Relations' latest attempt to justify its existence.
     First, to work us into a signing frenzy, the pledge bandwagon is rolled out and put on display: Mayor Daley has already signed. Cook County Board President John H. Stroger Jr., too. Ditto for Paul Vallas, the head of the public schools.
     I'm not sure whom that's supposed to impress. Now if Matt Hale or Lu Palmer had signed, that might signify something dramatic was afoot. But no.
     The pledge itself is a masterpiece of early 21st Century touchy-feeliness. It begins with three sentences, two simple ones and one tongue-twister that might have been crafted by the mayor himself.
     "I believe that every person has worth as an individual," it begins. "I believe that every person is entitled to dignity and respect." And then the Daleyian doozy: "I believe that every thought and every act of prejudice is harmful; if it is my thought or act, then it is harmful to me as well as others."
     Then the call to action:
     "Therefore, from this day forward I will strive daily to eliminate all forms of prejudice from my thoughts and actions. I will discourage all forms of prejudice by others at every opportunity. I will treat all people with dignity and respect; and I will strive daily to honor this pledge, knowing that metropolitan Chicago will be a better place because of my effort."
     Golly.
     The city plans to distribute this travesty to "youth-service agencies, places of worship, corporations, and businesses," in the form of "posters, bookmarks, and wallet-size cards." This is just hobbyhorsing — and given the endless meetings and discussions (whoops, make that dialogues) that no doubt went into this effort, not to mention the printing and postage, every Chicagoan has a right to greet it with a thumb to the nose, a wiggle of the fingers, and a moist blat of ridicule.
     Is there any reason we should accept this bit of empty symbolism from the same city that erected the nightmare housing projects we are still struggling to free ourselves from? The same city whose city council voted to ban Martin Luther King Jr.'s open occupancy marches 49 to 1? Of course not.
     The true insult behind the pledge is that racism is a deep, institutional problem, the sort of evil that surface do-goodism has no effect on whatsoever. Can anyone not in the direct employ of the department of human relations believe that any shred of racist feeling will be diminished because of this pledge? Impossible.
     And we haven't even begun to address the long, scary history of pledges and oaths of all forms. They're fine to inculcate patriotism in 6-year-olds, but after that they are usually studies in coercion and hypocrisy.
     We laugh at those old duck and cover civilian defense films from the 1950s because of their woefully inadequate understanding of the problem being faced. Just as curling up under your desk is of no use when the hydrogen bombs start falling, so weak albeit well-intentioned efforts such as this current travesty mock the seriousness of the problems they pretend to address.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 17, 2000.

It’s easier when you can pick your voters

     Pop quiz! Pencils ready? Then let’s begin.
     The 23th Ward is located:
     a) North of the 13th Ward.
     b) South of the 13th Ward.
     c) East of the 13th Ward.
     d) All of the above.
     The answer, of course, is “d” — the 23rd ward looks like a reverse capital F, closing its jaws around the squirming 13th, one of the many tortuous shapes created last year when the ward map of Chicago was gerrymandered into a crazy jigsaw puzzle, diluting the power that was supposed to be wielded by voters Tuesday.
     And we wonder why so many stay home.

     Early voting this year was historically high. Election officials estimate up to 42% of Chicagoans will vote. Not near half.
     Money was out in force, casting its proxy ballot — $1.2 million of Super PAC cash injected into the Chicago City Council races by real estate agents and various business interests.
     There were the usual last-minute shenanigans — anonymous flyers and phone calls, “concerned residents” blasting emails demanding certain candidates drop out, citing old speeding tickets and dusty alleged misdeeds.
     The Council races were the usual dog’s breakfast of the serious and the silly. Nine incumbents ran unopposed; others faced mobs of opponents in roiling battle royales. Almost a third of the Council either retired or announced their decision not to run — some because they are indicted or fancy themselves mayor, a prize not grabbed by a Chicago City Council member since 1876.
     This high turnover is ironic because, thanks to our am-I-toast-yet? mayor, the City Council is more of an actual branch of government than usual.     

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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.