Losing My Perspicacity August 19, 2024

Good morning and Happy Monday — welcome back to LMP.

Before we begin, a mea culpa from me. As I said on Thursday, I was headed down to Bloomington to move my youngest into his apartment for his senior year. I wrote the newsletter in the car using my mobile hotspot and thought everything was set and ready to go. Alas, something happened with the scheduling — not sure if I tried to schedule when I was in a cellular dead zone or what — but long story short, I closed my laptop before the scheduling “took.” Of course, I spent all day Thursday moving my kid into his new place, hit the Oliver Winery on the way out of town, and proceeded to get plastered at the Ren Faire on Saturday. So it wasn’t until Sunday that I realized that Friday’s newsletter never went out. Most humble apologies from me. Luckily, that was the most alcohol and travel-packed weekend I have scheduled for the near future, so I don’t foresee similar issues going forward.

Today, the DNC arrives in Chicago; Simone Biles needs someone to vet her sideline gear; Berlin, 1933 in Florida, 2024; and some thoughts on filling the Olympic Void.

Let’s go.

The DNC hits Chicago

Even out here in the suburbs, those of us who commute into the city regularly are girding our loins for the Democratic National Convention, which begins on Monday. I don’t plan on going downtown until it’s time for the Colbert taping on Wednesday, and many people I know are working from home this entire week. While it’s always exciting to see the city that so many of us love on the national stage, Chicago doesn’t exactly have a great track record with political conventions or, for that matter, protests.

Even though it happened before most of us Gen Xers were born, it’s hard to overstate how much the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention hangs over our collective memory. Chicago has hosted plenty of conventions since then — hell, we have an entire area of the lakefront dedicated to hosting conventions of all sorts — but the last time America was as divided as it feels today was probably the late 1960s.

Then there’s the way the Chicago Police, even under a Democratic mayor in Lori Lightfoot, handled the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, when the city essentially “kettled” protestors by raising the bridges all over the city, forcing them all into a confined space ringed by CPD, and then ordered them to disperse, with literally nowhere for them to go. A lot of people got hurt. 

A lot of non-residents don’t know this, but if you’re anywhere near the lakefront or river in Chicago, you essentially have to travel over moveable bridges, which the city raises a few times a year (with plenty of advance notice to residents) so that taller ships and sailboats can move in and out of the lakefront via the Chicago River.

It’s a pain in the ass if you miss the warning that the bridges are going up, as has happened to most of us at least once, and you find yourself driving around in circles, trying to find another way to where you were trying to go. But the scarier use of the bridges is to trap people in a specific area of the city, usually so the cops can move in. This is my biggest fear with the DNC starting and, along with it, the protests.

I’d love to think that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is not the same kind of mayor that Lori Lightfoot was, or that Richard J. Daley was before her. But both were Democrats and, while I wasn’t alive for Daley’s reign, we all saw Lightfoot pivot from a progressive candidate to a law-and-order-cops-are-the-good-guys mayor once the protests started. Brandon Johnson built his career on political activism, and he’s already intervened on behalf of one group of protestors who had previously been denied a permit by City Hall. But Chicago is as blue a city as they come, and I think everyone is concerned for the safety and speech rights of the protesting groups.

If you have a moment in the coming days, please spare a thought for those who will be facing down CPD over the course of the next few days. Though I live in the suburbs now, my family has lived in and around Chicago since before the Civil War, on both the north and west sides. I have worked in the city for nearly all of my professional life. Despite what the right-wing news would have people believe, Chicago is a beautiful, vibrant city that manages to be both working-class and cosmopolitan simultaneously. I love this city with all my heart, and I hope that the coming days will celebrate our political process, the right to speak out against the government, and, of course, the nomination of a Black woman for President of the United States.

Wish Chicago luck!

Speaking of Chicago….

There is one thing you don’t do in Chicago, and no one told Simone Biles.

If you can’t tell, that’s Biles on the sidelines of the Bears pre-season game wearing a jacket with images of her husband, Bears safety Jonathan Owens. No problem there. Except that those images of Owens are from when he played for his previous team — the Green Bay Packers. And ooofff, that big “G” on her shoulder is rough to look at.

Needless to say, it did not go over well with fans, and I can’t believe no one stopped her from wearing this to the game. In a normal football fandom, no one would care, and no one should care. But having spent several years as a sports talk radio host in Chicago, I can assure you that the Bears fandom is not normal. Should you require proof, you need only hop on #BearsTwitter and read some of the conversations happening at any time of day, at any time of the year.

See?

Today in terrible news

This is actually one of the things I’d written about for Friday, but I’m including it again because I am still so disturbed by this image of a college, supposedly a place of higher learning, emptying out its gender and diversity bookshelves and tossing the books out as literal trash.

Given that the title of my subtitle of my book is “Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America,” I wonder if it’s somewhere in that dumpster, having been labeled as “too woke” for the New College? What I know for sure is the amount of work that goes into writing a book: the weeks of writing and rewriting a book proposal, the debates over the title, the distraught late-night emails to your editor, the months of rewrites and edits that go into getting a book out into the world. And once it’s out there, you never get to stop promoting it. At least not for years. The collective decades of effort represented in that pile of “trash” should be enough to reduce all of us to tears.

And students didn’t even get a chance to take the books:

And here’s what students are left with:

Let’s all keep these images in our pockets to pull out the next time someone argues that it’s unfair to compare the GOP to Nazis.

If you’re missing the Olympics

It’s been a week, and I miss the Olympics terribly. NFL preseason and late-summer baseball are just not filling the void. The only good to come out of this week is that the WNBA is back and heating up as we head to the playoffs:

Congrats to Caitlin Clark on the record and to the New York Liberty, the first team to clinch a playoff spot.

And a friendly reminder that the Paralympics start on August 28 in Paris, and they’ll be on NBC and Peacock just like the Games were two weeks ago. Given that so many athletes are unknown to viewers until the Olympics start, I always wonder why we don’t hold the Paralympic Games in similar esteem. Perhaps, as with so many things, it just takes some prime-time broadcasts to get the ball rolling.

Have a great day today!