2024 08 03

Image made for Chicago Magazine at the best new restaurant: Warlord. Chicago, Illinois. February, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

As a longtime obsessive news reader, I’ve been hard on myself for shifting increasingly more towards youtube in recent years. A big part of why I started this blog was because I was concerned about the amount of time I was spending consuming youtube vs. creating art of my own. That said, I’m still wildly pro youtube and am amazed by the amount of top notch, well-written, interesting, and informative content (not to mention entertaining) which is available on the website. As with anything in life, balance is crucial and avoiding rabbit holes or becoming radicalized is always to be monitored.

The recent Trump assassination attempt has been on my mind a lot and continues to be wildly confusing and concerning, not because I think I know what really happened or how it happened, but simply because it happened at all, regardless the cause. The video linked below by RealLifeLore does a really nice job of summarizing the long list of assassination attempts against sitting presidents and people in important positions. Many of the events mentioned I had completely forgotten about or didn’t even know happened! When they are all recapped in quick succession, it makes the history sound so much more insane.

I enjoy considering historic events and why they happen while endlessly ruminating on it inside the ole brain of mine, even if I’m not “getting to the bottom of things”. Did you know a former mayor of Chicago Anton Cermak was assassinated while sitting next to then president-elect of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt? Had that single bullet struck its likely-intended target, the world would be a far different place today, and poor Anton would’ve been able to return home to the greatest city in the world. What a world.

-Clayton