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GOP: Justice is more than NYC can handle
The announcement from Atty. Gen. Eric Holder that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo inmates would be tried in federal court was a strong statement of the primacy of the rule of law in this country.
Predictably, the GOP leadership hated it.
Okay, the big announcement for whether Chicago will get the 2016 Olympics is due in about 90 minutes. Maybe we’ll get it, maybe Rio de Janiero will be the dark horse/sentimental underdog and pull it out in the end. But in case the Windy City does land the games, I wanted to make a list of the things that will inevitably change or disappear in the next 7 years.
–The wide open, quiet, 19th-century feel of Washington Park
–The media neglect of the whole South Side.
–The quiet mornings on the Lincoln Park rowing course, which will be upgraded and lead to a new wave of Sculling-Mania!!
–The days when $1.5 billion seems like a large amount of money.
–the four-star Chicago flag, which will certainly get a fifth for the Games. (How interesting that the six-pointed star is now being graphically used all over the place, from T-shirts to company logos. Why did that take so long to think of?)
–Our feeling of being the Second City (though the condescension from New York will never stop–“It used to be the Hog Butcher to the world, now it’s the locker room.”)
–An affordable cab ride.
–the make-up of a good Chicago hot dog. There are bigger things to worry about, but I’m pretty certain that the recipes for basic local foods — hot dogs, Italian beef, Frango mints from The Store That Must Not Be Named — will all be watered down and homogenized to accommodate the new visitors. The opposite problem might be that every new restaurant in town is going to be a deep-dish pizzeria, “authentic Chicago style”.
–Richie Daley is just going to get scarier and scarier.
UPDATE: Wait, we DIDN’T get it??? Who the hell do they think they are????
Jaun Antonio Sumthinorother? He’s a DEAD man!!! Didn’t he watch The Untouchables??
Read my take at true/slant here.
Satirists are usually of two minds about bad ideas. While bad ideas might be detrimental to society, the economy, or individual people’s lives, they generally lead to pretty good jokes.
So when I read that the Chicago City Council voted unanimously to guarantee any potential cost overruns for the 2016 Olympics, I was distinctly ambivalent. Bad idea? Sure. Funny material? It starts with the picture of all those clowns standing up and applauding like the Bulls just won in overtime. And the notion that this somehow proves that the Olympics have popular support around here.
This morning on WBBM, Stephanie Streeter, the chief executive officer of the US Olympic Committee, wanted to put a little fire under our collective seats by saying that Chicago is not the front runner for hosting the games. (Again: Good news? Bad news? Please don’t t’row me in dat Briar Patch!) She went on to say that we could really turn things around in time for the October 10 vote:
“What you want to do is be in the lead on the last day, after the vote is taken, not necessarily going into the competition,” she said, in an exclusive interview with WBBM.
Streeter said she believes Chicago is peaking at the right time. She called the Chicago bid “spectacular,” said Wednesday’s unanimous Chicago City Council vote to make financial guarantees erased one potential obstacle, and said the unanimity speaks far louder than the recent Chicago Tribune poll that showed Chicagoans nearly evenly split over support for the bid.
There’s another laugh for you: that the City Council vote represented a unanimity of spirit for the city as a whole. I assume she’s visited the city numerous times in recent years, and knows how things work. So, she’s either deluded, or she’s having a little wry laugh at the expense of the radio audience.
In their enthusiasm, the aldermen must believe the mayor’s assertion that everything’s covered, that in the unlikely event of an overrun, the city’s insurance will take care of it. The aldermen certainly have a hunger to crunch budgetary numbers–just look at how well they scrutinized the parking meter lease deal. These guys LIVE for their fiduciary duties!
The rest of the city? Forgive us if we’re the teensiest bit skeptical about this whole deal. Unless we see some real improvements in the city–most notably with mass transit–we’d like to know exactly what we’re all getting for the half-billion dollar bill we might end up footing.
But at least some of us cynical ones will get some material to work with.
On our trip to Canada in August, an old man having a smoke outside the Tim Horton’s in Baden, Ontario, noticed our Illinois license plates. “From the States, eh?” (Gotta say, stereotypes aside, this was the one time I heard an “Eh?” for the whole trip.)
Yep.
“They don’t treat their old folks too good down there.”
Well, there you go, a great way to start a conversation. I could callously agree and get on with my cruller-eating, or disagree and get into a discussion with someone who had obviously made up his own mind. Where are you now, Dale Carnegie?
Despite the misconception, Canada does have one national language, and it is politeness. So I had to actually try and converse with him. It really didn’t go anywhere, as he just wanted to tell me he pays $4 for his prescriptions and he knows all about the US because he and his late wife used to golf a lot in North Carolina.
But one reason to stop and talk was to get an outsider’s opinion of the whole health care “debate” now devolving. I hadn’t seen any of the town hall shouting matches, but I don’t think I needed to. If I wanted to see a bunch of middle-aged white guys shouting, I could go to a demolition derby. Unfortunately, I’m pretty uninformed about the topic. Which generally doesn’t stop anyone from having an opinion, but I’m kind of old school about such things. I also don’t like arguing with pensioners. Bad form.
But to explain to him why the arguments were happening the way they have been? Sort of impossible in a casual setting. If he didn’t know that America is more dog-eat-dog than Canada by this stage in his life, he’s not paying attention, and to make the point felt like self-flagellation. Which isn’t covered by my insurance.
I haven’t bothered to watch many of the town hall screamfests now that I’m back with a TV and broadband access. I mean, what’s there to learn, except that a huge portion of my country has been pounded by economic and social change and doesn’t like it one bit, and has decided that aligning themselves with the pharma-insurance industry will improve their lives? Today, I did watch the video clip from the NJ meeting, when a woman in a wheelchair with auto-immune problems was heckled and mocked because she might lose her home. Was it cruel? Yes. Surprising? No.
Because a large portion of Americans have no big objections to watching people’s lives collapse. Not a majority, I don’t think, but certainly a good chunk. As long as they’re not personally affected and their corner of the world stays the same, everyone else can just go to hell. You can dress it all up in flashy principles like small government, no creeping socialism, and all that, but that group of people really doesn’t mind watching others suffer. “The devil take the hindmost,” they think, and one more day when someone else is the hindmost is a good one.
Trying to explain that to a nice old Canuck in front of a donut shop isn’t easy. I didn’t try.
But at the end of our conversation, as a way of sign-off, he said, “Well, regardless, you guys seem to get things done in the end. You find ways to get it all together.”
Sure we do, as long as you don’t tally up all the costs.
While driving around town last night and today, all sorts of snarky, angry comments about Darth Cheney and his CYA, paranoid, astoundingly fact-free speech yesterday careened through my head. For a comprehensive (so far) list of the lies and near-lies that he pulled out of his black heart at the American Enterprise Institute speech, check out this coverage from the McClatchey newspapers.
But this morning, as the beautiful weekend looms, it’s almost repulsive to wade into that muck, so I’m not going to. I’d rather spend Memorial Day thinking about the men and women who did what they thought was right, pray for their families and friends, and hope that as Cheney and his defenders shrink in stature irreversibly, politicians will soon begin to live up to the ideals that America was founded on.
Now, if I could only purge my head of the combo of Cheney’s voice with the image of General Jack D. Ripper, lecturing us about our precious bodily fluids.
I’ve always tried to be generous with Christopher Buckley. Though I don’t know him, he apparently was insightful enough 15 years ago to assert that I was obviously a conservative if I wrote Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I cut him some slack, probably out of professional courtesy/envy. I can’t think of anyone else who gets paid to write satirical novels on a regular basis (though I’ve only managed to finish one of them), so slagging him might collapse the whole genre. And many of his articles are funny, though not as funny as he seems to think.
But something he wrote for The Daily Beast yesterday takes him off the protected list. On the subject of the released torture memos, he upbraids many commentators for getting “sanctimonious” about the fact that the US tortured its prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharaib. For those of us who are appalled that our government engages in torture, he takes pains to remind us that:
It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)
The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.
If he thinks the “captive bad guys” are fleshy repositories about Islamic doomsday plans (especially after being in custody for 6 years), then Buckley’s not as smart as he thinks. (The question of what to do with the men themselves is certainly thorny, now that they will either be tortured more in their home countries or set loose on the streets, living testimony that America is some kind of devil.) If he thinks it’s “sanctimonious” to want to hold people accountable for giving the order to torture, then he’s a suck-up to power.
And since elsewhere in the article he makes joking comparisons between the now-open torture techniques and his rough handling from the senior boys at boarding school, then he’s a turd, pure and simple.
In the days and weeks after 9/11, I remember telling people that we should take every one of those filthy desert barbarians and remove them to places where they could be tortured until they gave up every name in their rolodexes. And if they died in the meantime, small loss. And I bet a lot of other Americans were screaming the same thing. But I’m not a leader. This country would be in ridiculous shape if I were even given an honorary mayorship for the day. But there are smarter, saner heads than mine in Washington. Some were in leadership positions 7-8 years ago. We need to find out who overruled them and made torture our policy against our enemies.
I’m not being naive. I’m aware this country has engaged in secretive torture (and worse) during my lifetime. And at the risk of sounding cynical or paranoid, nothing will ever be done about that. But during this decade, torture has been used as an official tool in the “war on terror,” and I want it investigated, repudiated, degraded, eliminated. Not to have a witch hunt for lower-level ops, but to get to the highest levels, the ones who told the agents in the field, impressed with their machismo in the face of moral uncertainty, to “take the gloves off.” Because when the higher-ups sanctioned torture, they did it in my name as a citizen.
I was ecstatic on the day that Illinois set a moratorium on the death penalty because I didn’t want the state killing people in my name. Regardless of whether it was an effective deterrent for criminals (it isn’t), or whether victims’ families need “closure”, I don’t want Illinois as a policy killing people in my name. It’s too bad it wasn’t done legislatively, but I’ll take it anyway I can.
Sure, people will make political hay out of the torture memos, but such is life. You can get as realpolitik as you want here, but you’re still faced with the question: What’s the right thing to do? If you cast the whole struggle as a battle of civilization vs. barbarism, where did we land? Do you want to look your kid in the eye–or your mother, or John Wayne, or Abe Lincoln–and say, “Yes, some fanatic medievalists hate America, and blew up innocent citizens, so in response we gathered up a bunch of people on the battlefield in that part of the world and tortured them repeatedly over years until they told us some stuff that may or may not be accurate, just to stop the pain, though it wasn’t really torture, more like hazing, really–and it was the right thing to do. We’re all safer now. And they had it coming to them anyway. So let’s move on.”
If that’s how Buckley thinks, then I should be grateful he was honest. Now I don’t have to feel obliged to read any more of his dry satires of Washington. He always seemed too comfortable with the bullshit he was ostensibly making fun of, now we know why. (I’ve always been suspicious ever since I saw a blurb from him on someone’s novel–possibly one by Stephen Fry– praising it as “Trenchantly, tootingly funny.” For that, he deserves a punch in the kiwis and a week chained to Carlos Mencia.)
Whenever I’m tempted to ditch this city and go live in a yurt somewhere, I think of nights like I had last night, during which I saw history being made, and I realize that quiet and peace of mind aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Last night I was lucky enough to attend the press preview of a new show at Second City e.t.c. that was ripped out of today’s papers. “Rod Blagojevich, Superstar” was one of the funniest nights I have ever spent in the theater. When it finds its permanent slot in the schedule, you absolutely have to go see it. You will be amazed at how effortlessly one man’s life provided the grist for a ridiculous 60 minutes of lampoonery.
I don’t mean to imply that the people behind the show didn’t work their butts off to get it up on stage. Ed Furman, the book writer, is an old friend from performing days. He told me their first email with the idea was dated January 5. That was only a month after the Senate Seat Sale Scandal broke, and a couple weeks before Blago’s media blitz and impeachment. Who knows how they’ll be able to amend the show in the future?
Ed’s writing did a terrific job capturing Blago’s strange combination of Willie Stark and Astro Boy. Getting the psychology right was more important than crafting an impersonation (although Joey Bland was greatly entertaining in the role, as was his wig). My favorite line of the night was Blago shouting at Roland Burris in all sincerity, “All great leaders have criminal charges filed against them!” (Burris’ reply: “Um, no they don’t.”)
The truly amazing part of the show was how little everyone had to gin up the characters to maximize the laughs. The only character pushed really far into caricature was a toilet-mouthed Patti Blagojevich (and for all I know, it may have been an accurate portrayal). By laying out Blago’s gall, ego and blindness in very clear and simple scenes (with a few terrific songs thrown in), Furman and the cast captured perfectly the strange, pathetic, puny life of the would-be Populist Scrapper.
In the audience I saw at least three veteran reporters from the papers and TV, so there were certainly more there that I didn’t recognize. I got to see WSJ reporter Bryan Gruley, who went to my high school and has a new mystery novel coming out next month. Also in attendance was Ill Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who laughed through the whole show, even at Lauren Dowden’s pinched-mouth impersonation of her. Madigan shook hands all around and hung out with the cast and writers for a very long time, posing for pictures and the like. (There’ll probably be some pics up for that eventually at Second City’s website here.)
The whispers beforehand, though, were whether the ex-Governor was going to show up for the event. He’d been invited, of course, and everyone agreed he had the gall to attend (and nothing left to lose, obviously). He didn’t show up last night, but I’m betting he eventually shows up. His ego would allow nothing less.
One sentence sticks out during Blago’s impassioned populist monologue today:
“I can’t believe I’m governor of Illinois.”
UPDATE:
So now it’s Governor BlaGONEovich, as the Illinois Senate (a stalwart and respectable bunch of folks if ever one was assembled) has voted 59-0 to impeach him and bar him from ever holding office in the state again.
Rod, of course, was defiant, and said that he was only guilty of caring TOO MUCH, and that the Senate didn’t have the power to remove a governor who cared so much about the people, taking his human shields with him as he was downed on the floor of the arena. Or something like that.
I’m feeling sad that this is over–if a person is going to flame out in public, I prefer the long, drawn out kind of denouement– but I guess the state has to get back into the business of petitioning money from Washington in the next bailout. I’ll miss the sound of helicopters in the neighborhood, that’s for sure. It will seem like years by the time he’s hauled into court by the Feds, and by then, the grass will be green and baseball will be playing, and it just won’t have that certain je nais sai quoi that this whole proceeding did.
I was feeling a little queasy during his closing argument, I have to admit, when he started bringing up the fact that the people of Illinois voted him into office twice. I didn’t need the reminder, and it seemed like a backhanded accusation besides. “Why didn’t you impeach me during my first term?” he asked rhetorically. Well, we might have IF WE HAD KNOWN HOW COMPLETELY CROOKED YOU WERE AND HAD IT ALL ON TAPE BESIDES!
It’s pretty impressive that nobody in the state legislature did or said anything awkward, stupid, venal or vindictive through this whole thing, leaving Rod the stage all to himself. Let that be the measure of the man: he was so reviled among his fellow politicians that they quashed their natural urge to get in front of a camera and spout off, just so that nothing could interrupt his getting kicked to the curb. Of course, I guess they’ll be on their best behavior for a while, maybe until after the federal trial. He is certainly in one classic Biblical respect their scapegoat, but in the final analysis, you have to have been quite the prong to be so reviled among everyone who knows you.
(Maybe you can’t read the subhead of the pulp picture above, but one of the articles is called “Hot Rods–Cool Death.” Just change the punctuation and voila! Instant political commentary!)
This is a hauntingly beautiful tribute to Rosa Parks, MLK and Barack Obama. Click and send it to others.
That was quite some inaugural yesterday. Hope you had a chance to see it as it happened. The TV was on CNN almost all day around here, and I sat down to watch more than I should of parades and balls. I haven’t watched that much TV in a long time, and I was beginning to feel it by early evening. Bloated, unmotivated, a little down–this must be how couch potatoes always feel, but some of it was also due to the passing of the moment. The glitz and glamor will dissipate as our long time of rebuilding begins. Obama might be ready to roll up his sleeves, but I’m always a fan of the interim, the suspense, the what if. It’s safer than commitment.
But the event was a marvelous thing to see, even if W failed to fall down the steps or grab the microphone for a few “clairifcatures” like I hoped. At least Cheney had the sense of theatricality to show up in a wheelchair. I just couldn’t tell if he reminded me of old Mr. Potter, some Bond villain, or Joe Flaherty doing Guy Caballero. (“The wheelchair is for RESPECT!”)
While Obama’s swearing in was thrilling, and his speech pretty darn good (I liked his victory speech in Grant Park a little better), I think everyone would agree that the occasional poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander was a waste of time. (I joked to my wife that it was a surefire way to get 1 million people off the mall quickly, and by gosh if Jon Stewart didn’t use the same joke last night. I still got it!) Of course, it’s no picnic following a speech by the new president, but her “Prasie song for the day” sounded like a laundry list of “Dumb Things I Gotta Do.” The delivery was flat, the words limp, the sentiment mundane. Other than that, it was great. (For more comments, check out the forum at the Poetry Foundation HERE.)
It’s a challenge to capture the spirit of a momentous occasion in a few lines of poetry. Few in history have ever done it well, and the pressure can be taxing. An article caught my eye last fall about the British Poet Laureate, who in his tenure has felt his spring of inspiration dry up. In sympathy for Andrew Motion and the difficulty of poetizing for state events and special occasions, I wrote the following sonnet:
On the Occasion of a New Shopping Center
From Cairo’s souks, the alleys of Tibet,
The saffron-flaked bazaars of Bangalore—
This HyperMart, tho’ newly opened, yet
Does put to shame all those that went before.
In all of England stands there not a shop
To match its offerings in magnitude:
Such produce fresh, such lean and meaty chops,
A deli counter of such plentitude.
In contrast does my soul constrict from want
Of any inspiration, hope or spark,
An empty cupboard, dusty, full of….ants
And metaphors that somehow miss their mark.Such bargains here, a shopper can’t refuse,
Yet none can match how cheap I sold my muse.
Maybe some zoning commission needs a laureate?
I got an email last week from a fan of my “Politically Correct” books, asking me about my Washington Insider parody of “Puss ‘N Boots.” Julie S wrote:
Do you not see any similarities between President Elect Obama’s campaign and your retelling of Puss N’ Boots? So interesting since you wrote it before his Senate run and you are from Chicago. What do you think?
So I had to go back and check the story, since I wrote it so long ago. Wow! There on page 57 of Once Upon A More Enlightened Time was the sentence:
Their optimistically simple campaign slogan–“It’s Time for a Change”–seemed to strike a chord with the optimistically simple voters.
Should I send this to my buddy at the Center for Free Inquiry-Los Angeles, who conducts all sorts of tests for people who claim psychic talents? Hardly. This was written in 1994, when Obama had only just graduated law school and was a junior lawyer in Chicago. No, it just looks like simplistic slogans don’t change much through the years. (And with a natural talent for inspiring yet vague slogans, it looks like I neglected a career that would’ve been far more lucrative.)
Although I can’t tell from the writer’s email, I think she’s angling for me to say Obama is as shallow and opportunistic as the young cat owner in “Puss N Boots”, who just keeps his mouth shut and lets surrogates drop slanders about his opponent and allows the system elevate him at the other’s expense. If this isn’t the case, I apologize, but more than 3/4 of the fan mail I ever get comes from the Right or the Extreme Right, who think they have found a kindred spirit in me. My characterization of Puss ‘N Boots as the schemer and media manipulator behind the throne was an amalgam of many real politicos, including Lee Atwater, Dick Morris, and James Carville.
And the shallow, opportunistic young master? While there are no jokes about bed spelling or deer-in-the-headlights expressions, I modeled him after J. Danforth Quayle.
The whole Illinois Senate seat saga has caught my attention only meagerly. Should I care who will be my senator for the next 10-11 months? Not enough to get incensed about it. All the procedurals and arguments about special elections are pretty bloodless. The only thing that really catches my eye through all this is the human element.
The self-righteous stupidity and the ability to bluff yourself into an inescapable corner: Harry Reid.
The ego’s need to attach one more title to your name, regardless of how doing so will completely ruin what little respect your name already carried in Illinois: Roland Burris.
The evil genius supervillain’s skill at creating an insidious gas that will make the supposed good guys fight each other instead of him: Bleepin’ Blagojevich.
Unfortunately, nothing I’ve seen has been a surprise. It’s like telling me that another high draft choice for the Bears will crap out. Why bother to get to know the names? I agree with the Trib’s Eric Zorn that the choice of Burris is legal, and while people had a chance to change the law, they didn’t, so tough noogies. You can scream all you want about special elections or the corruption of the system or whatever. It’s moot as moot gets. Our new junior senator will be treated in Washington like he’s got head lice and will more than likely do as he’s told and choose not to run in 2010. Time to start thinking about that, and watching how that slate is chosen.
I’ve been waiting for the real comedy nugget in all this, and it looks like it came yesterday at the Chicago City Council (a comedic institution that outpaces even The Second City). In a stroke session that would tire and embarrass all but the most veteran porn stars, the City Council spent an hour praising Burris for his long record of public service, and making sure he knows who his friends really are. (For a radio report on this with excerpts, check out this link from WBEZ’s Ben Calhoun.) Ald. Dick Mell praised Burris: “You stood up against an onslaught that, a lot of our knees would have buckled. And you did it with dignity.”
Truer words were never spoken, except maybe when he toasted Blago and his daughter at their wedding reception.
My favorite quote from the stroke session came from Ald. Anthony Beale:
“We all know we got issues with the person [who] appointed him and that the process had been tainted, but when he chose Roland Burris, he untainted the process.”
I chose this because of my juvenile enjoyment of hearing the word “taint”. Taint taint taint taint. It’s a useful word, a friendly and flexible word, with at least three meanings that apply very clearly to Burris’ situation:
The colloquial: Taint as a contraction for “it ain’t”, as exemplified in the title “T’aint Necessarily So.” A passerby might see a full-fledged senator and statesman in Burris, but time will show t’aint the case.
The physical: that part of the male anatomy that “taint yer balls and taint yer ass.” With all the crotch-punching and ass-kissing that’s been going on through this, it’s fitting that we refer to the seat, the process and just about everyone involved as “tainted”.
The linguistic: If Ald. Beale had had his dictionary near him when he wrote his mash note to Burris, he would’ve discovered that “untainted” actually means “untarnished, free from blemishes.” That hasn’t been the case for a long long time.
How can you beat a lead graf like this?
As an urban planning adviser in the sun- drenched Spanish resort town of Marbella, Juan Antonio Roca had after- tax income of less than 150,000 euros a year.
When he was arrested for corruption in March 2006, police seized assets worth 2.4 billion euros ($3.4 billion), including a century-old palace in Madrid, a country estate equipped with a helipad overlooking the Rock of Gibraltar and a stud farm guarded by a tiger.
I’m sure the horses really enjoyed the security situation. What else are tigers good for, anyway?
It’s not enough that Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president. It’s not enough that he’s the first president since JFK with urban roots. It’s not enough that he is the first to be from a northern state since Gerry Ford. That’s not enough for New York. Typically, the Big Apple demands more. And New York Magazine had the audacity to declare among its “Reasons to Love New York 2008” article that “Obama Is One of Us, Despite All That Business About Chicago.”
Barack Obama, on the other hand, deliberately chose New York as a young man, transferring his junior year from Occidental College to Columbia, and all one has to do is crack the binding of Dreams From My Father to appreciate the authenticity of his experience. It’s all right there in chapter one, paragraph one, sentence four. “The apartment was small,” he writes, “with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.” Before readers have even turned the page, he’s mentioned his stoop, his fire escape, and the Knicks.
Great. Sounds like a wonderful formative “authentic” experience. The article goes on to point out all the NYers who will be in Obama’s cabinet, including Park Forest’s and Little Rock’s own Hillary Clinton.
Sorry, you mugs. Your native son Rudy ran for president, and if not for a few strategic gaffes (like not running in any crummy little states like Iowa and NH) might have brought his “authentic” style of integrity and personal magnetism to the White House.
This is just another instance of NY parochialism, which I’ve found is as strong there as it is in small town Wisconsin. NYers find it hard to believe that any worthy person would choose to live anywhere but The City So Nice They Named It Twice (In Case The First Plaque Gets Lifted). A John Updike quote I use most often comes from one of my favorite satires, Bech is Back: Being a New Yorker, “She assumed everyone who lived west of the Hudson was kind of kidding.”
Tough rugelach, NYers. Obama is ours, for better and for worse. The South Side is the new Kennebunkport, the White Sox are now the Nation’s Team, and we can all put away our Louis L’Amour books and break out the Saul Bellow.
No, wait, Bellow cut out of here at the end of his career to get stroked in Boston. Bleep him. Start reading Nelson Algren and Alexsandr Hemon.
Could Mrs. Blago be yet another in the long line of supernatural reasons the Cubs will never win the World Series?
During the call, Rod Blagojevich’s wife can be heard in the background telling Rod Blagojevich to tell Deputy Governor A ‘to hold up that fucking Cubs shit … fuck them'”
Is this an Evil Eye? A Harridan Hex? A Wifely Whammy?
On the other hand, maybe she and Lee Elia can get together and record some party records.
