Though plenty of atrocities occurred elsewhere this year, King Richard II and his court did their part to uphold our atrocious local traditions. Look at the leadership role Daley played in honoring the Chicago police officers and firefighters who went to New York to pitch in following the devastation of September 11. Listen to the words of praise he had for all our police and fire personnel. But don’t notice that, after nearly three years of stalling, he still hasn’t given those noble public servants their union contracts. Words are cheap; contracts are about money. We have better things to do with our money–like donate it to the owners of the Chicago Bears. And why not? It enriches the McCaskeys and mucks up the lakefront at the same time. This is what’s called Chicagonomics, or the science of political atrocities, and King Richard offered us many lessons in it this year.
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Economics 102: Socialism for the Crony
Jane Byrne invented Taste of Chicago back in 1980 to showcase the city’s ethnic and fine-dining eateries. Ever since, a spot at the fest has meant big bucks for any restaurant fortunate enough to be selected. This year Richard II decided to showcase the haute cuisine of another little dining find–McDonald’s, the first national chain to be represented at the Taste. More big bucks for the Big Mac came when the firm landed a multimillion-dollar concession at O’Hare airport. King Richard declaimed that none of this had anything to do with the fact that McDonald’s retains Jeremiah Joyce, the mayor’s political guru, as its consultant. Joyce also served as consultant to a firm that landed a duty-free-shop concession at O’Hare, and the two firms reportedly paid him $1.8 million last year. The mayor reassured us that the contracts were decided on merit alone. “I’m not here to turn anyone into millionaires,” he declared. The same Joyce also bought up land in Peotone–just in case Daley relented and let a new airport be built out there. “If you really believe in this,” Daley said of the proposed site last January, “go buy 100 acres of land.” This is called an incentive to be a friend of Richard II.
Gender Studies 101: Love Thy Fellow Woman
It’s been an atrocity-ridden year for Third Ward alderman Dorothy Tillman. First, singer Lou Rawls pulled his money out of a controversial cultural center in Bronzeville that’s being sponsored by Tillman. The alderman mysteriously dropped Rawls’s name from the project, which she’d been promoting as a tribute to him. Next, a couple of white waiters from the Palmer House sued the hotel for racial discrimination because Tillman had demanded that they be replaced by black waiters at her fund-raiser there. Finally, her fellow black mapmakers drew her ire for giving her a ward that, though predominantly African-American, included parts of racially hostile Bridgeport. “It’s post-traumatic-slavery syndrome,” Tillman said of the minority cartographers. The ward they drew for her looked somewhat like a fist with an erect middle finger. The latter portion included the ancestral home of both mayors Daley, where the incumbent’s mother still resides.
Spanish 101: Los Egomaniacs
Close friends were deeply distressed to learn that State Representative Louis Lang ended his yearlong campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor. Of course only his close friends even knew he was running.
