It should be noted that Sun-Times is no better than Chi Trib when it comes to giving email addresses with bylines.  As in today’s stories here and here about Chicago Historical Society getting a new president, a lawyer — in neither story, by the way, the new man is so designated only at the end, leaving some of us to wonder if new “leader” is president or chairman.  Trib gives William Mullen address, wmullen@tribune.com — at end of story, vs. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel standard, putting it right under byline, thus to encourage reader response.  No address is given for S-T’s Andrew Hermann.

Both call Jones Day a Chicago law firm, but it’s a Cleveland firm — “The Cleveland megafirm,” Startribune.com called it just yesterday — with a Chicago office since 1987, which is a case of getting something on the fly, I’d say, and not checking it — copy desk anywhere?

Both stories, on the other hand, were of keen interest to this reader, who caught the immediate past president, Lonnie Bunch, in an Oak Park appearance in 2002 and was impressed with his ambivalence about living in Oak Park, apparently for reasons of race, even though he had picked it over Wilmette rather than put his child in an all-white school.  We don’t have all-white schools in Oak Park.  Bunch by his own admission had been well received in Oak Park and was a featured speaker in a centennial program.  He spoke off the cuff and got caught in that ambivalence by a question after his talk from a fellow black.

In any case, Bunch announced in March that he was returning to Washington and the Smithsonian to head up a new Afro-Am museum, this after presiding over severe blows to the midsection of the Chicago society, which during his tenure came up with big deficit, low attendance, and heavy staff cuts.  His parting shot, one might say, was an exhibit all about lynching and other white-on-black atrocities of the last several centuries. 

Might there be a connection here with declining attendance?  Give me the parent eager to take his kiddies to see gruesome pictures of lynchings, and I give you one in a distinct numerical minority.  Bunch is praised in absentia by the society’s chairman as a tough act to follow, for his “ability to reach out” to blacks and hispanics; but that seems to have been a case of treating them monolithically and assuming they aren’t like us white folks.  Blacks and hispanics may not be all so eager to put their kids through the blood-and-thunder aggrieved-minority process as some think.

The new man, Gary T. Johnson, will be handing over day-to-day duties to CHS veteran Russell Lewis, which seems wise.  Johnson has to go out there and raise money.

===================

On another front, see Margaret Ramirez’ page one Chi Trib virtual takeout on Mormons.  Having roundly criticized her recently, I must say this is a good one, done not on deadline but with time to spare and lots of room — it’s a whopping 2,220 words!  The peg is newly arriving blacks and hispanics among Mormon membership.  That is handled with nice combination of stats and quotes, while a neat summary of Mormonism is also provided.  I love you, Margaret!  All is forgiven!

“THE LEFT LIED AND LONDONERS DIED” is recommended as a good motto by blogger Jeff Goldstein, a writer and teacher in Colorado, in view of how Left spokesmen fed Muslim rage with their publicizing of false reports about Guatanamo abuses.  He names

Teddy, Carl, Dick, Howard, et al—along with their mouthpieces in the mainstream press who, until recently, have been too busy questioning every Bush administration motive to investigate Gitmo on their own, relying instead on misleading press releases from Amnesty International

Dick is Illinois’ own Durbin.  As for “mouthpieces in the mainstream press,” Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn comes to mind with his blog-diatribe vs. Durbin, run here a few days ago, for apologizing!

Goldstein brings it up in view of the 7/7 bomber’s specifically mentioning Gitmo abuses as a complaint that led him to be a bomber, arguing for violent retaliation while visiting relatives in Pakistan.  This blog item, at “Protein Wisdom,” he heads “Why Rhetoric Matters,” his argument for which was in my case bringing coals to Newcastle.

Bush introduces Sandra replacement tonight — clearly a move to take the heat off Rove.

See Dennis Byrne on lies and more lies by way of LEAVING THINGS OUT when talking about stem cell research, as if there are not two kinds: embryo and adult.  Today’s Chi Trib.

This month’s Wed. Journal column is about VMA, $2 given to beggar, and other important things.

This is the best one of our wise men can come up with on a moment’s notice.  It tells us a lot about vacuity and the shallow mind of a newspaper columnist:

=================================== 
Eric Zorn’s Notebook

July 07, 2005
TERROR IN LONDON – THERE’S NO GOOD REASON IT WON’T HAPPEN HERE

After nearly every tragedy or disaster, it’s human nature for those of us not directly involved to tick off the reasons why we weren’t hit, why we couldn’t have been hit.

I don’t work in an internationally significant skyscraper. I don’t vacation in Thailand. I don’t often fly transcontinentally. I don’t live on a coast routinely smashed by hurrircanes or in a small town in the tornado belt. I don’t serve in the armed forces. I would never find myself in that kind of neighborhood or be out at that hour.

And, today, I don’t live in London.

It’s mostly nonsense to calm the soul, but it preserves the important illusion that we can be safe, and that horrible things only happen to other people.

The essence of terror, though, is that it shatters that illusion and mocks the notion that any of us can guarantee our safety if we just install enough checkpoints, confiscate enough nail clippers from enough little old ladies and build enough barriers around us.

That essence is what we forget when we think of “terror” as an organized, opposing army that our military can fight and perhaps defeat, and when we put “terror” only in the context of spectacular acts of mass murder such as those of 9/11/2001.

“Terror” is a near-paralyzing fear of the random, the sudden, the unpredictable. It’s the absence of sanctuary. It’s the corrosive, destructive sense that no place is safe and none of the old rules of engagement apply.

With every car bombing and suicide slaughter in Iraq in recent months and with today’s deadly series of rush-hour explosions in London, the same thought hits me: There’s no good reason we haven’t seen such small-scale attacks here –- bombs hidden in vans, suitcases, sewers, tunnels, mall trash receptacles -– and no reason to assume we won’t.

One reason you don’t read this thought very often is that there’s no ringing follow-up to it; no “…and yet we will meet this challenge with…” to calm the heart. And so most of us superstitiously avoid mentioning it in hopes that somehow the vicious, disaffected zealots in America will always be different from those overseas.

My son was on the subway this morning at the very moment I heard the news from London. I knew he was safe — in fact he called when he emerged from the below-ground station in the Loop to get directions to the bus stop — and I didn’t feel terror.

But I did feel again the nagging tug of terror’s point man: Dread.

Posted by ezorn at July 7, 2005 09:49 AM

So the Trice-told Chi Trib story of the woman raped as a 12–year-old by her stepfather, disbelieved by mother and everyone else, ended happily.  That is to say, justice was served, and the son of a b-tch got eight years.  Trice supplied no more verve to the telling than in part one, which ran yesterday, however.  Look, sere writing has its place, but there’s a difference between clean and flat copy.  Maddening.

Reader J. agreed, asking if Trice would tell a friend this story “in similar fashion.”  She doesn’t think so and blames it on lack of reader-consciousness.  “The day of gentle reader, dear reader, kind reader went out with ink wells,” she moans.  “It’s authorial narcissism. The story’s not the thing. The teller is.”

Reader N., on the other hand, made a plea for forbearance.  “It was a rare D.T. Trice column I actually finished, much to my surprise.” 

For him the story came through.  It was the thing.  But for differences like that, where would horse races be?

SecDef Rumsfeld blames media for anti-Iraq-occupation feelings among the polled, implies they don’t know the half of it because bad news has driven out good (like bad money).  That can’t be, in view of the drum fire of content that emanates daily from Main streamers.  Take today’s page one head (below the fold, admittedly) of Chi Trib:

A treacherous year since Iraq transfer: `This is not a democracy. This is chaos.’

4th paragraph has man who was optimistic a year ago when U.S. transferred authority to Iraqis, now having “lost all hope for his country after living through a treacherous year in the new Iraq.”  He “no longer has confidence that the U.S. military can effectively fight the insurgency,” he tells Trib staffer Aamer Madhani and/or his (probably Iraqi helpers) Nadeem Majeed and Zaid Sabah.

“Nothing will change until the Americans leave,” said al-Deen, 33, at his home in Baghdad’s Saydiyah neighborhood. “The resistance will not stop until the Americans go away. Once they leave, we can then only figure out if there is any hope of the Sunnis and Shiites coming together.”

Al-Deen’s troubles are “greater than most,” but his “pessimism reflects a growing despondence among Iraqis” in Baghdad.”  Madhani really believes this, we may assume; but we are asked to take his word for it, are we not?  That al-Deen “reflects” what (many? most? how many?) people feel?  This reminds Chi Trib readers of the Michael Tackett page-one analyses out of Washington — columns given quasi-story (article) status, latter-day Carey Orr cartoons that never failed to depict FDR with a long cigarette-holder in his mouth.  Old habits die not easily at the once World’s Greatest Newspaper (WGN, as in radio and TV even now).

We read further of  “dour mood” in Baghdad and “frustration” in the U.S., including among “lawmakers” calling for an “exit strategy.”  Bush “is expected to point to examples of progress” in his speech tonight, “[b]ut in the streets of Baghdad, sovereignty is still a nebulous idea,” says Madhani, who clearly knows better, having discussed the matter with upwards of two people, including Sarah Abdul Kareem, 21, a Shiite, who says, “This is not a democracy.  This is chaos.”  And that’s the story’s pull quote for sub head, as you noted above.

However, five paragraphs down, Sarah Kareem says Americans should not leave yet!  Well!  Gen. Abizaid is quoted, ditto Rumsfeld, as confusing Iraqis with “mixed messages.” One paragraph (one!) in the middle of the story allows:

[W]hile violence has overwhelmed hot spots such as Baghdad, Mosul and most of western Anbar province, much of the Kurdish north and Shiite south remain relatively peaceful. In those areas, there were high levels of participation in the national elections in January and greater strides have been made with reconstruction.

The story (analysis? column in article drag?) quotes two (two!) more Iraqis to make its point — “treacherous year . . . not a democracy.  . . . chaos,” says the page-one sub head, remember — including a barber whose fellow barber was shot down by Islamic fascists (such a term! I must mean insurgents) who object to certain kinds of haircuts as “anti-Islamic.”

Ah but the corker is the obligatory Chi Trib frantic-victim four-color picture on the jump-page (front section back page), showing two brothers mourning their slain father.  Sad, sad, sad.  Could moveon.org ask for anything more?