And then they'll sing a song.
Oh, and they'll probably be right. Can't forget that part of it...
I'm currently 30 miles outside Chicago. That saddens me, since I'd rather be in Chicago right now so I could walk around the Loop and take pictures of the streets that I'm told are surprisingly empty for a gorgeous Friday in late May.
So, basically, after three solid weeks of ratcheting panic and, "STAY AWAY WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE," Chicago is enjoying what might be the most peaceful day it's ever enjoyed. At the very least it's a close second to the city-wide day of mourning declared when it was announced that Chicago Code had not been renewed by FOX.
It'll be nice, though, to hear all of the talking heads and pundits and everyone else stand up and say, "You know what? Maybe we panicked over nothing and we need to seriously re-consider our response to things like this. Perhaps it's time to have a little faith in humanity again."
Oh, wait, I'm sorry. That's how things work in my alternate universe where people are intelligent and decent and capable of being reasonable. In that universe I'm also married to Kristen Bell and Mary Elizabeth Winstead at the same time. Also, I have a pony.
So, since we don't live in that world, I'll bet I can tell you exactly how this went. The whole thing ended up being peaceful and no one got hurt because of all the great prep work done by the City of Chicago and the various other entities who spent the last month working all the office workers up into a nice frothing panic at the thought they might have to possible be in the same street at the same time as an unwashed freak. Also, too, there might even be MORE unwashed freaks than usual, so said office workers wouldn't have the luxury of ganging up on that person and yelling, "Get a job!"
Because, y'know, that's the real problem. They're all too goddamn lazy to work and they want to take all of the hard working office peoples' stuff away.
Again, welcome to America in 2012. Treasure it, people.
They're giving the city of Chicago over to the mob on Friday in preparation for giving it over to the landed gentry of the largely superfluous Cold Warmongering body known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the weekend. It's been strange to be in Chicago for these last few weeks.
Way back on May 2nd we got our first warning about what to expect when the rabid hordes of Occupy protesters descend on the city like so many patchouli-scented locusts. At the time I made jokes about the importance of holding hourly panic drills. I also planned on taking my lunch hours on May 18th and May 21st to (gasp) head out into the streets of Chicago with a camera and take pictures of the doin's-a-transpiring.
In the last two weeks I've witnessed the panic slowly getting ratcheted up from "pointless and laughable" to "extreme and genuinely worrisome." Last weekend I found out that Metra (the collective train lines that connect the suburbs beyond the reach of the L to the city) is putting in regulations for Saturday to Monday that skip merrily past "draconian" right into "completely batshit absurd." Then yesterday my company declared an all-company work from home day and said that the doors to the office will be locked and don't bother even trying to come in because OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.
Well, that last part was more subtext...
Anyway, I hope to have an opportunity to write more about this later. But I've drawn one conclusion. In America we now have two sides: the fascists who want to take away your freedom and the wild, unreasonable animals who want to burn everything to the ground. Because, y'know, that's way easier to believe than any sissified moderate option that actually requires listening to your opponent.
There's really no sense in wondering why we're so fucked up. This is America in 2012. Treasure every minute of it, people.
That’s why you’ve been able to push things this far. We’ve kind of been hoping that you’d wake up one morning, look at the things you’d written or said, the sermons you’ve preached, the blog posts you’ve published, the hateful things you’ve screamed at children and grieving parents, and suddenly see them with new eyes. We’ve been hoping that you’d wake up. No, not hoping — assuming. It happens often enough. People drop their fear all the time, shake their heads, make amends for the harm they’ve caused and start living their lives without the poisoned anger and hatred.
Once again, irony doesn't stand a chance:
Representative Paul D. Ryan strolls the halls of Capitol Hill with the anarchist band Rage Against the Machine pounding through his earbuds.
Although, hey, the next time someone tells you not to let children listen to the evil rock music, lest it influence them to the Devil or something, you know where to find a counterpoint. So, hooray?
Turn on the radio
Nah, fuck it, turn it off
Fear is your only god on the radio
Nah, fuck it, turn it off
-Rage Against the Machine, "Vietnow"
It's really too freaking bad I'm so damn busy right now. I want nothing more than to write and I know exactly what I want to write about: Chicago.
Specifically, I want to write about that which defines the essence of Chicago. It comes down to one word: Haymarket.
Yesterday was May Day. Friday is the 126th anniversary of the Haymarket "Riot." Yesterday's May Day labor rally and parade went right past the memorial at Haymarket Square, which was once a monument to the heroism of the police who opened fire in the dark on a (mostly) peaceful crowd and mostly managed to kill themselves.
Chicago was once the heart and soul of the labor movement. There's a reason that Upton Sinclair set The Jungle in Packingtown.
Anyway, yesterday was May Day. I posted this picture:
In a bit over two weeks, we have this:
NATO is coming to Haymarket. I've already witnessed someone -- specifically someone with authority in the CFD -- connect yesterday's extremely peaceful and orderly May Day rally to the expected NATO rallies a "the insanity that started off yesterday."
I also received the official "It's Time to Start Panicking" warning from building services that include all the beefed-up security procedures and warnings not to associate with the protesters, lest they, I don't know, kill me or something.
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Meanwhile, yesterday morning I read "The Butcher of Anderson Station," a prequel-ish short story to Leviathan's Wake. I read it right after finishing Mira Grant's Countdown, a novella prequel to the Newsflesh trilogy. After that I started re-reading Feed.
I consider my recent reading choices extremely timely, here in the space between Haymarket and NATO.
At the risk of repeating myself ad-fucking-nauseum, thou must goest and readest the words of Charles P. Pierce:
The assault on Trayvon Martin's character implicitly argues that he was expendable, too, the once-living price we "all" have to pay to be free in the exercise of our Second Amendment rights. It began almost immediately after he hit the pavement. They drug-tested him, but not the man who shot him. Now, we've got conservative "journalists" creepy-crawling through every aspect of his life to find some reason... well, to find some reason for what? That he was a kid who tweeted silly stuff, posted some silly stuff on Facebook, and once got suspended because he was found with a bag that may once have held marijuana? This is not a search for justice. It's a search for an alibi, and it's a search through some of the uglier aspects of American society to find the oldest, cheapest alibi of all — that the lives of black children are less important than the right of someone to pack heat, that the lives of black children must needs always take a back seat to fear, that black children in this country are bargaining chips, and not very valuable ones at that.
It seems as though there is an actual collection of people in this country who absolutely want to turn America into Omelas. Someone should tell them that we're not supposed to want to live in the world Le Guin envisioned.
The other half of the article is about the arguments that the people on the steps of the Supreme Court are making against ObamaCare. For a certain subset of those it's a poorly-aimed salvo against Sandra Fluke and her supposed wannabe whore constituency. Turns out there's a sci-fi book about that, too.
One of the problems with being a historian -- for what little value of that word I can place upon my own head -- is that I see historical patterns. I've been meaning to write about this for a long time but I never have quite figured out the words to use. I also haven't managed to come up with the thirty- or forty-thousand words it will require. No single event in history is ever particularly applicable to any event now, so saying, "This is exactly like what the Romans did and therefore _________________," isn't particularly useful. There's also the problem that people by and large only draw the comparisons between now and then based on popular knowledge and what
Hell, look at all the people trying to draw comparisons between Carter and Obama or Clinton and Obama. Enough has changed since 1980 and 1996 that we can't draw anything more than an extremely suspect comparison. Saying that we can compare the US now to the Romans then is laughable, at best. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
That said, it's possible to determine patterns. Studying Byzantine history, for one, kind of depresses me. I read the stories of the last half of that empire and wonder what would have happened if the people there had realized, "This is a moment which will resonate through history." I wonder if there were those Byzantine Cassandras who did see it and tried in vain to sound the alarm. It's obvious now that they failed by doing A and doing B would have made way more sense. Doing thing A was disastrous at the time but nobody knew for a generation or two so how was anyone to know?
I see those Byzantine moments in America on a regular basis. That saddens me to no end.
We executed children in this country until long after the rest of the world — except Iran — thought that was a good idea. Almost six million children live in poverty in this country. Almost six million of them are without health insurance of any kind, and that's reckoned to be an improvement. None of this is accidental. These children are expendable because the people we elect make policy decisions of which we approve — or, at least, of which we do not disapprove.
It's fascinating, too, reading this piece in light of my multi-year journey through Left Behind with Fred Clark. The question he keeps asking -- the central question to the whole thing -- is, "Why doesn't anyone care about the missing children?"
That is a question that I, a childless individual who isn't in a real hurry to change, imagine would be a central issue to the whole thing. I imagine that the disappearance of a child would involve panic and rage and depression and be the sort of thing that keeps the entire world distracted for a time. I can't escape that idea.
And yet the national representatives of my former religious siblings don't see things like that. Sure, they ask, "Won't somebody think of the children?" from time to time, but it's only when there are cheap points to be made about the evils of television, music, and liberal "indoctrination" in the schooling system. For them children are props, to be trotted out onstage at the right time and then put away when convenient.
Why does it take President Obama to point out the truth: Trayvon Martin was somebody's child. Trayvon Martin could have been anybody's child.
Well, not anybody's. I've been known to walk around in black hoodies without worrying about getting shot. Geraldo Rivera has never had to tell me that I deserve to get a bullet in the face because of my sartorial selections.
Funny, that.
I got off the train and in to my dad's car, as I so often do, the afternoon of March 20th. On our way back to my parents' house (where I am still living on a temporary basis due to the fact that the Colossal Bank of Dicks is, well, a collection of dicks and making my life miserable) we noticed that there were many, many cars parked on Forest, an otherwise nondescript street in the otherwise nondescript but picturesque suburb of Wheaton. A Wheaton cop was parked on Stoddard in a white Ford Transit van.
My dad stopped and rolled his window down. "What's going on down there?" he asked.
"Some Republican thing," the cop responded.
"Republicans in Wheaton?" my dad asked. We all had a laugh, since that's like feigning shock at the idea of gambling in Casablanca.
Anyway, an hour or so later I was back on Stoddard. The cop had moved, some dickshitter in an SUV was stopped in front of the Acura in front of me. I realized that whatever was happening on Stoddard meant that I wasn't going to get anywhere anytime soon.
It was important that I get going, too. I was on my way to bar trivia for the first time in a month. This is what I do on Tuesdays now, after all.
So I pulled into a driveway, turned around, headed back to Prarie, and ultimately took a left on President, which I hate doing. That's kind of the point of the drive down Stoddard. It allows me to hit President at a four-way stop.
When I hit the corner of President and Harrison I looked in my rearview mirror. A pair of cop cars were making a turn off of Forest on to President, coming my way. A couple black SUVs were behind me.
At that point I realized that whoever the Republican on Forest was, it was someone who mattered. It couldn't have been Congressman Peter Roskam, since he was a Wheatonite, but also running unopposed and, therefore, not likely to make a big deal of much of anything. I was also pretty sure he didn't live on Forest. It couldn't have been one of the local Republican gobshites, like Kirk Dillard or Brian McKillip. They'd been showing up at train stations, buying commuters free coffee, and generally not being worth the sort of treatment that a motorcade implied.
Nope. This had to be a muckety-muck. My assumption was that it was the Frothy Mixture, or possibly Newt, assuming he could afford the plane fare.
Turns out that it was Mitt fucking Romney. So I was within spitting distance of the Mittbot. This is second only to the time that a motorcade that had to belong to either Gee Dubs or Governor Goodhair delayed my commute home while I was living in Irving on the list of times Republican assholes have made my life slightly more miserable than it otherwise had to be.
Also, too, the idea of Mittens hanging in Wheaton fascinates me. This is Wheaton, after all. Wheaton is an Evangelical stronghold that likes Mormons about as much as it like Muslims, atheists, and women who have sex with men to whom they are not married. That is to say that Wheaton doesn't like Mormons too much. But more than Wheaton doesn't like Mormons, Wheaton likes Republicans. And Wheaton likes winners.
Which is why Barack Obama did pretty well in Wheaton back in 2008. I don't know about Wheaton itself, but DuPage County went 55% to Obama in 2008. Considering that DuPage is a spot of red in the sea of blue known as Chicago and the collar counties...well...
Either way, I was within two blocks of Mitt Romney for over an hour today.
That's nearly as exciting as the first time I met Roger Clyne. Wait, who the hell am I kidding. It's nearly as exciting as the time Kirk Dillard, local Republican gobshite for Illinois Senate, bought me coffee at the Glen Ellyn train station.
Then again, Mitt Romney has yet to give me my morning caffeine fix...
He's given a doctor friend his platform for an anonymous guest post on one of the current big women's health issues.
Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.
Read it. Pass it on.
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