Yesterday the journalist James Surowiecki tweeted: “There’s no question someone in the White House told Trump to call the war in Iran an ‘incursion,’ but he heard it as ‘excursion’ and now he keeps calling it that—making the war sound like a holiday getaway—because no one around him ever corrects him when he makes a mistake.”
As Bill Maher would say: I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true.
And speaking of excursions gone bad, non-Chicagoans might not know the story of the S.S. Eastland, full of would-be picnickers on a happy July day in 1915 …
… that capsized at the dock on the Chicago River, drowning 844 passengers.
Said an eyewitness: “As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap. I didn’t believe a huge steamer had done this before my eyes, lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.”
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