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Chicago: Where “Alderman” means the Same as “Godfather” means the same as “Baron”

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Our Ruling Class is So Eminently Deserving Of Their Powers.

Two police sources—a former gang investigator and a veteran detective—bluntly acknowledge that even if the police know of dubious dealings between an alderman and a gang leader or drug dealer, there is little, if anything, they can do, thanks to what they say is the department’s unofficial rule: Stay away from public officials. “We can’t arrest aldermen,” says the gang investigator, “unless they’re doing something obvious to endanger someone. We’re told to stand down.” The detective concurs: “It’s the unwritten rule. There’s a two-tier justice system here.”

Beyond providing protection from police—the gangs’ number one request—public officials can help in other ways. Gang leaders, particularly the most powerful, are usually looking to build on the riches they already have. Knowing an alderman or a state legislator—or even a congressman—can help. Traditionally, aldermen have almost total say over what gets built and what sorts of businesses open in their wards. They also have considerable sway over city contracts, which can mean tens of thousands to millions of dollars for gang-owned businesses.

The whole thing. Read it.

And Now For an Article in Which The Writer Pretends to Prefer That Harrison Ford had Stayed a Carpenter

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The picture at the top is better than the article, but the article’s not bad.

Fame on that level closes as many doors as it opens. Few superfamous actors have ever seemed as uncomfortable with superfame as Ford always has. (Actual Google hit count for “Harrison Ford reclusive”: 28.7 million.) Maybe it was that the break came relatively late for him; maybe the years he’d spent being knocked around the studio system prior to that left him with a cynicism about the business that no amount of success could erode. Maybe he really is cripplingly shy, the way people say; maybe that’s why he’s such a curiously flat-lineish talk-show guest. Or maybe he’s just a guy who hates his job.

Whatever. Ford could have gone back to carpentering any time over the last thirty years. Maybe we shouldn’t psychoanalyze him based on whatever he says in the part of his job – talking to the entertainment press – that every actor hates.

Yes, at some level fame is always less fun than the not-famous imagine. In some ways it has to be a pain in the ass. But it sure beats working for a living.

What Raging Rebecca Martinson Should Have Written

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Like a majority of college students, I didn’t belong to a frat or sorority. And like a majority of those, I had attitudes and prejudices about those that did. They weren’t terribly original, and I won’t recount them. I don’t have them anymore. Looking back with a bit of wisdom, Greek Life has a certain logic to it. It provides an extended family, with pertaining duties and obligations, to those who have just stepped away from their original family. It provides a social calendar and the support of one’s peers, at a time when those things are handy. A well-run frat or sorority provides leadership opportunities, academic standards, and service to the community.

But for people who never went Greek, a lot of the inside-baseball, hyperdramatic hysteria of Greek life – rushing, pledging, judging, competing — seems exactly that. Which may explain why Rebecca Martinson’s email rant to her sorority sisters has gone viral (scroll down to read the full text of the email). It’s the towering rage, with expletives used as punctuation, juxtaposed with the insignificance of the subject — her sisters failing to show adequate Sorority Spirit – that prompts hilarious reposting and now, even dramatic readings by actors.

Embarassments like this only have one kind of ending, and today Martinson resigned from her sorority. I likewise hope that Martinson learns from this, and that we all find someone else to abuse now that she’s paid the price for Internet notoriety. But when I read the email, I find myself wondering, did she have a point? Was there something, however trivial, that her sisters should have been doing, that they were not? And could she have found a way to express that which would have a) made clear how serious she took it, b) gotten the email’s recipients to respond in a way she thought positive, and c) NOT prompted anyone to make it public?

Well, let’s imagine that world. Let’s imagine that Martinson had angrily typed out her rant in, say, Microsoft Word, rather than an email browser, and then let it sit for a day, and then came back to it, and then revised her thoughts to something professional.

It may have looked like this:

Continue reading →

Where the Hell I Have Been, or 70 is a Suffusion of Yello

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(Dirk Gently reference.)

Periods of time come when the thought of adding content to a blog puzzles the will. The evergreen political nonsense saps the spirit. Repeating the same arguments to the same applause sounds agonizingly dull.

Besides, it’s springtime outside. The human animal was not meant to remain inside shut up with People Being Wrong on the Internet when the trees bloom and the thermometer finally creeps above the magical number of 70.

And besides that, I’ve found an entirely new way to express myself.

Youtube posits this as the “Official video” of “Oh Yeah” the tune by Swiss electronica duo Yello. The track hit #51 on Billboard in the spring of ’87, and appeared in Ferris Bueller, Secret of My Success, and any other scene where the director wanted a montage expressing a character’s sudden overpowering desire. ‘Cording to Wikipedia, they had a whole slew of albums and such, and had regular hits on the UK charts and the US Hot Dance Club/Club Play Singles chart. Still most of us know them from this, if we know them at all.

Well they’ve put out an app that will make you a DJ.

Yellofier video tutorial from Yello on Vimeo.

Downloaded it on a whim, spent a few days playing with it. It’s genius: intuitive and idiot-simple.You can record any sound and turn it into a not-bad-sounding electronica song in a few minutes. I have done so, the results are silly.

Yellow Boom from Andrew Patrick on Vimeo.

That’s the first thing I made on the first day I messed with it. Nothing to it: theme and variation. The one’s I’ve done since are better, better enough that I download them to my iTunes and like them on repeated listens. I’ll post them somehow later: on Soundcloud, maybe. “Duke Bike Rider” is my phony rock-n’-roller stage name. We all wear different hats.

This is spring: your ears perk up and you try something new. Your life renews.

We Do Not Understand the Middle East

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That’s a pretty obvious statement, but Michael Totten’s article about the End of Hezbollah (his lips to God’s ears) underlines it wonderfully:

Part of Hezbollah’s support used to come from the fact that they were perceived as not being corrupt, but that’s over now, too.

“Even my family members who are big Hezbollah supporters are talking about the corruption,” she said. “One of my relatives told me she hates them now. And she has always been a huge resistance supporter.”

A large number of Lebanon’s Shia may not like Hezbollah so much anymore, but the support is still there because they feel like they don’t have any choice. They are afraid. Every sect felt this way during the civil war, when even people who are natural cosmopolitan pacifists supported one of “their own” sectarian militias because they were afraid of the others. It would happen to you, too, if you lived in an environment with a weak and dysfunctional state that can’t provide security while your neighbors are trying to kill you.

We discuss the Middle East in simple, monochrome terms, because drawing a distinction between radical Muslims seems like angels-on-pinheads territory. They all want to kill us, so what’s the difference?

But the Middle East is rife with faultlines and divisions: Shia, Sunni, Salafist, Alawite:

The Alawites—Bashar al-Assad’s minority sect—are not actually Shias, not really. Washington thinks they are, but that’s because back in the 1970s the Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias. For a thousand years before that, no one thought of the Alawites as Shias or even Muslims. What they are is a secretive and closed heterodox minority that fuses Christianity, Gnosticism, and Twelver Shia Islam together into something else entirely. Muslims have always considered them infidels.

I consider myself reasonably well-versed on the subject of basic Islam, and I’ve never heard of these people. I’d always assumed Assad was a Sunni Muslim, because I always figured the Tigris-Euphrates was the faultline between Sunni and Shia.

Until we learn these things institutionally — until the State and Defense Departments, the CIA etc. develop policy that exploits the complexities of the Middle East — we will make no headway.

Fortunately, it’s going to be a Long War.

Notice to Everyone Who Said “Gay Marriage Will Not Lead to the Legalization of Polygamy.”

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You are now officially bigots.

We have a tendency to dismiss or marginalize people we don’t understand. We see women in polygamous marriages and assume they are victims. “They grew up in an unhealthy environment,” we say. “They didn’t really choose polygamy; they were just born into it.” Without question, that is sometimes true. But it’s also true of many (too many) monogamous marriages. Plenty of women, polygamous or otherwise, are born into unhealthy environments that they repeat later in life. There’s no difference. All marriages deserve access to the support and resources they need to build happy, healthy lives, regardless of how many partners are involved. Arguments about whether a woman’s consensual sexual and romantic choices are “healthy” should have no bearing on the legal process. And while polygamy remains illegal, women who choose this lifestyle don’t have access to the protections and benefits that legal marriage provides.

Welcome to the club.

A Bunch of People Violently Died, Which Means It’s Time for Chris Matthews to Beclown Himself.

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And Outrage becomes cliche.

At different points during the day, I had the TV on three different cable channels: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. None of them have covered themselves in glory — Allah has video of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yammering pointlessly – but Chris Matthews was atrocious beyond description.

The worst part of ideological cocooning lies in how you lose sight of the ability to attribute good or evil outside of your epistemic shell. If violence happens in America, the Tea Party must be to blame, because the Tea Party is the representation of everything I think evil, so every evil act belongs to them somehow.

At present, the “authorities” (not sure if Boston PD or FBI or some combination thereof) are questioning a Saudi national in connection with the bombing. That doesn’t mean anything. They may determine he had nothing to do with it. But I don’t think there are very many Saudis in the Tea Party movement. Call it a hunch.

It’s boring to have to point these things out. It wearies the soul that such folly should stand, naked and unashamed, in front of us all. It’s infuriating that while we are burying our dead, that we have to blame it on each other’s politics. But the Left will have it so. They never let a good crisis go to waste.

Kermit Gosnell and the Holy of Holies

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Abortion is not new. It did not spring fully-formed from the head of the Supreme Court in 1973. It is as old as civilization itself, and the controversy surrounding it is just as old:

“Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit? Where there are many efforts at abortion? Where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot thou dost not let continue a mere harlot, but makest her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevent its being born. Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?”

That’s St. John Chrysostom, one of the Doctors of the Church, writing in the 4th century AD, damning men for seducing women and abandoning them, forcing abortion upon them (just in case you thought that those old unmarried men had no idea what made babies happen). This argument has been going on for a very long time, and it’s going to keep going on. Nothing that has happened recently is going to change that.

It’s safe to say that the dam is bursting on the Kermit Gosnell story, as it inevitably must have. Nothing as lurid and horrifying as the prosecution alleges could have truly failed to escape the public consciousness, no matter how much certain circles would have preferred it.

I am late to this story, not because I didn’t know about it, and not because I haven’t been reading up on it (Stacy McCain in particular has been all over it from the beginning). I haven’t wanted to write about this for the same reason Megan McArdle didn’t: sheer revulsion and horror. What this bland, grandfatherly-looking man of 72 – a poster-boy for “the banality of evil” if ever one existed – created in his Philadelphia clinic amounts to an infant-sized Auschwitz, a crime against humanity. And even generically pro-life people like myself dont’ want to realize that it exists, for to do so would be to violate a polite taboo.

In ancient Israel, the sanctorum at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem was called the Holy of Holies. As the home of the Ark of the Covenant, it made incarnate the presence of God in Israel. Only one man – the High Priest – on only one day – Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – could ever enter the Holy of Holies. Anyone else (such as the sons of Aaron in Leviticus 10) who entered died. The presence of God was not for the unworthy to look upon.

If modern feminism’s obsession with “reproductive freedom” has something of a religious character (and there are those that say so), then the birth control pill is its Eucharist, and abortion its Holy of Holies. It is Between a Woman and Her Doctor: mere mortals are not supposed to know what goes on. When anti-abortion activists take to the streets with pictures of mutilated fetuses, we are angry at the makers of the pictures, not the makers of the content. This is true even of pro-life people, such as myself. We don’t want to see this. We don’t want to know. Witness Roger Simon:

The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself.  This is about the A-word.

No feeling human being can read this story or watch it on TV without being confronted with the obvious conclusion — like it or not — that abortion is murder.

It may be murder with extenuating circumstances (rape, survival of the mother, etc.) but it is murder nonetheless.  Dr. Gosnell — monster though he is — has accidentally shoved that uncomfortable truth in our faces.

Pushing this case front and center in the media would change the national narrative on this subject.  (The current stats are here, via Rasmussen.)

I can give you two guinea pigs to prove this point — my wife Sheryl and me.  We were in the kitchen last night, preparing dinner, when we saw a short report of this story on the countertop TV.

Both lifelong “pro-choice” people, after watching only seconds, we embarked in an immediate discussion of whether it was time to reconsider that view.  (Didn’t human life really begin at the moment of conception?  What other time?) Neither of us was comfortable as a “pro-choice” advocate in the face of these horrifying revelations.  How could we be?

Yes, Dr. Gosnell was exceptional (thank God for that!), but a dead fetus was a dead fetus, even if incinerated in some supposedly humane fashion rather than left crying out in blind agony on the operating room floor, as was reportedly the case with one of Gosnell’s victims. I say blind because this second-trimester fetus did not yet have fully formed eyes. (Think about that one.)

So I don’t think I’m “pro-choice” anymore, but I’m not really “pro-life” either.  I would feel like a hypocrite. I don’t want to pretend to ideals I have serious doubts I would be able to uphold in a real-world situation.  If a woman in my family, or a close friend, were (Heaven forbid) impregnated through rape, I would undoubtedly support her right to abortion.  I might even advocate it.  I also have no idea how I would react if confronted by having to make a choice between the life of a fetus and his/her mother.  Just the thought makes my head spin.

And there it is. We are compromised. We see murder and we pretend not to. We call it something else. We treat it as magic, as though a first-trimester abortion mystically removes the unwanted-abstraction-which-is-not-alive-shut-up, transubstantiates the woman from “pregnant” to “not pregnant” and sends her heroically on her way. The death, the blood, the humanity-reduced-to-laboratory-specimens (I have seen them), we doublethink these messy realities away. And we tell our young (and ourselves, truth be told) that they may fornicate freely, without consequence, because “protection” exists, and if “protection” fails (or they fail “protection”) we have this Serious And Important Issue to Pontificate and Philosophize About, which will unmake the the consequence.

We call this “Love”. We call it “Modern.” We call it “Necessary.” We call it “Woman Retaking her Power from the Patriarchy.” We call it “Free of Medieval Moralizing.” We call it “Rational”. We don’t call it “Infant Girl Decapitated With Scissors.“

We don’t want to see it. We don’t want to know.