WHAT WOULD MACHIAVELLI SAY ABOUT GEORGIA AND DONALD TRUMP?

 

10/29/21

The GOP loss of the Senate in Georgia back in January through the sheer ineptitude and self-obsession of Donald Trump has been roundly and nearly unanimously regarded as a huge political blow to the Republican Party.  As the monumental Democratic overreach of a spending bill currently called “Build Back Better” wends its way through the legislative sausage making process, yours truly has concluded that, at least from the GOP’s political perspective, losing the Senate may have been an admittedly heavily disguised blessing.

If Donald Trump had not suppressed the GOP vote in Georgia through his self-centered pouting about his “stolen” re-election bid and the GOP won at least one of those two seats, the Republicans would now have been in control of the Senate.   President Biden and his fellow travelers in Congress would not have even considered such a monumental reshaping of the American economy and society as that contemplated in the “Build Back Better” program; such a program would have been, to use a vastly overused expression of the last, oh, thirty years or so, dead on arrival in the Senate.   The President’s, and his Party’s, aspirations would thus have to be throttled back a notch or seven to a program that would have been far more modest in its aspirations and thus far more acceptable to the American voting public, or at least that portion of the American voting public that constitutes the “middle” and decides elections.   Democratic prospects in 2022 and in 2024 would thus be far rosier than they appear to be at the moment, with a public that just wanted to get rid of Donald Trump facing the prospect of a vast, expensive, and unprecedented remaking of American society by a party with the barest of majorities.   So, from a political perspective, which is the only perspective that seems to matter to those who hold virtual lifelong sinecures in Washington and insist on calling themselves public servants, the Republicans should be delighted that they were able to provide only a modest check on the lascivious ambitions of the Democrats, and that only with the help of a couple of apparently sober Democrats.

From a policy perspective, of course, Donald Trump’s undermining his own Party by means of his customary childish fit of pique has been a disaster.   Without his suppression of the Republican vote, the GOP would have held the Senate and President Biden thus would have been forced to deal with the Republicans when crafting legislation, which thus would have been far more modest in its ambitions and therefore more cognizant of seemingly bygone considerations like market economics and political consensus that have done so much to make this country great.   Further, one does not have to have libertarian instincts to realize that the country historically has done better when the government is divided; think, in recent memory, of the Reagan/O’Neill collaboration of the ‘80s and the Clinton/Gingrich collaboration of the ‘90s.   Things are better when neither Party is in complete charge, which says a lot about human nature and the character of those who rule, er, sorry, govern us.

What also says a lot about the character of the people who govern us is that a lot of Republicans, once they figure this out, will probably be agreeing with me that losing the Senate was probably a good thing because, after all, it gives their Party a chance to avoid self-immolation and pick up at least one of the houses of Congress in 2022 and, maybe, the White House in 2024.  And what could possibly be more important to our public servants than their own career prospects?

QUINN ON LORI LIGHTFOOT, RETROACTIVE TAX INCREASES, THE OUTFIT, AND PEDRO MARTINEZ

 

10/29/21

 

Now that I have started writing for this blog again (See today’s other post.) after a five-month absence, I thought I’d amalgamate some letters I have written to various newspapers over the last few months for my readers’ convenience and, of course, reading pleasure:

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Chicago Sun-Times back in September after Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago School Board selected Pedro Martinez, a man with no teaching background, to run the Chicago Public Schools.  The letter was published on 9/19/21:

 

 

9/14/21

 

In the wake of the selection of Pedro Martinez to head the Chicago Public Schools, politicians and others who opine for a living go immediately to Mr. Martinez’s ethnicity, pondering whether it is a good thing for CPS, and/or for the Mayor’s political fortunes, for a Latino to be in charge of the city’s schools.   What serious people think would be a more relevant question, i.e., whether it is a good thing for a man who does not have an education degree and has never held a teaching position to head the CPS, pales to the point of insignificance when compared to the only trait that seems to matter about anybody nowadays, i.e., his or her race or ethnicity.

 

The debate regarding Mr. Martinez’s qualifications is yet another instance of the ironic failure of those who most piously profess to oppose racism to see anything beyond race.

 

 

 

 

I wrote the following letter, on one of my favorite subjects, to the Wall Street Journal back in July as the growing crime wave in Chicago achieved even greater prominence as a national story.  It was published on August 5:

 

 

7/31/21

 

Congratulations to Joseph Epstein (“Crime is No Longer a Family Business in Chicago,” Opinion, 7/31/21) for committing the dual effronteries of calling for vigorous law enforcement as a remedy for the crime that plagues our hometown and for pointing out that the disabling of the Outfit was not an unmitigated positive for our city.

 

Federal prosecutors crippled the Outfit with a series of high-profile trials over the last thirty or so years, the most salient of which was the Family Secrets trial in 2007, which resulted in nearly the entire upper echelon of the Outfit, including Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, Frank Calabrese, Sr., and James Marcello going away for effective or actual life sentences.    Perhaps the prosecutors were overcome with naïve notions of the perfectibility of man that have become so popular of late.  More likely they were just doing their jobs and doing them well.  However, if they and those who cheered them on thought the result of their efforts would be an abatement of crime in Chicago, they were sorely mistaken or at least obviously disappointed.   The disabling of the Outfit in Chicago, and of the broader Mob throughout the country, has resulted not in less crime but, instead, in the replacement of organized crime with disorganized crime.  

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal back in June when, in one of the early iterations of its schemes to grab more money from workers, investors and other productive types, the Biden Administration proposed a retroactive income tax increase.  The missive was published on June 7:

 

6/1/21

 

Not only is the Biden Administration’s plan to make its income tax increases retroactive (“A Retroactive Tax Increase, 5/29/21) bad fiscal and financial policy, it makes no sense if the objective of the tax increase is, as the Biden Administration claims, to raise revenue rather than to punish the successful, as many suspect.

 

A prospective tax increase would, if history, common sense, and human nature are to serve as guides, result in a flurry of stock sales before the imposition of the tax increase as investors sell to avoid pending confiscatory rates.   Those sales, of course, would result in a windfall of capital gains tax revenue for the federal government at, ironically only to the naïve, the pre-increase rates.  A retroactive tax increase provides no such opportunities for tax avoidance selling and hence no resultant windfall for the federal government.

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal in May after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would do one-on-one interviews only with journalists of color.  It wasn’t published, but it should have been:

 

5/21/21

 

There is a profound irony that the Wall Street Journal missed in its Review & Outlook piece on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s recent declaration that “I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.”   (“Racism at Chicago’s City Hall,” 5/21/21)   This declaration came from a mayor who did not carry a single black ward in the February, 2019 first round of Chicago’s mayoral election.   While Mayor Lightfoot trounced the hapless Toni Preckwinkle in the run-off with decent, though not overwhelming, Black support, she got into the run-off on the strength of her vote in the trendy, “progressive” wards on the near north side.   Not only are these wards overwhelmingly White and at least relatively wealthy, but they are also the types of places in which the White reporters she has now excluded from one-on-one interviews live. 

 

Maybe the Mayor is bent on political suicide, and who would blame her for wanting to at least figuratively get out of town, given the hopelessness of the job she now holds?   A better bet, though, is that Mayor Lightfoot feels that the “progressive” voters who put her in office are sufficiently cowed by actual or potential charges of “racism” that she can count on their support in 2023.

 

 

RAHM AND THE DEMOCRATS: “TAX THE RICH, FEED THE POOR…’TIL THERE AREN’T NO RICH NO MORE” ?

 

5/26/21

 

Rahm Emanuel (See one of today’s other posts.) can’t resist the temptation to politicize everything; after all, he is a creation and a creature of politics and government.   On May 17, he wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion piece in which he opined that the Democrats could pursue the “soak the rich” theme with impunity because the most salient modern Republican did the same thing to the adulation of most of his Party.   While Mr. Emanuel had a good point, as he usually does, regarding Mr. Trump’s dismissive, or maybe just completely ignorant, attitude toward the free market and all that it has done for our country and the world, the “make the rich pay their fair share” argument might make a lot of sense politically but makes no sense, at least regarding the U.S. federal income tax, economically or financially.   However, Mr. Emanuel may have another unspoken point, indeed, an opinion that, if he holds it all, he would never utter out loud, to wit, the American electorate surely isn’t getting any smarter and hence is more and more amenable to simplistic arguments that have little grounding in reality.

 

I sent the following letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the paper didn’t publish it.  Given that the Journal has run two of my letters in the last month or so (See two of today’s other posts.), I am not surprised or disappointed:

 

 

 

 

5/17/21

 

Rahm Emanuel (“Why the GOP Has Gone Quiet Over Tax Hikes,” 5/17/21) cites a Pew Research survey indicating that “Nearly 60% of Americans are bothered ‘a lot’ that corporations and rich people don’t pay their fair share” and a Navigation Research poll in which 69% of respondents support raising taxes on the rich.   Mr. Emanuel credits what he sees as this growing consensus to “Mr. Trump’s triumph of decoupling the coalition Reagan worked so assiduously to assemble.”

 

Mr. Emanuel is correct in one of his assertions; surely, Mr. Trump’s characteristic self-serving opportunism fanned the already enormous conflagration of “anti-rich” sentiment and hence crippled the advance of both conservatism and common sense.  However, Mr. Emanuel once again drops the ball in this argument largely because of his combination of political genius and economic ignorance, a combination that is by no means unique among our political class,

 

First, Mr. Emanuel fails to make the distinction between being “rich,” a balance sheet concept, and earning a high income, an income statement concept.   While sounding esoteric, this is a crucial distinction for political, economic, and financial reasons that utterly eludes politicians and the people they are trying to snooker.

 

Second, if indeed people are clamoring for higher taxes on “the rich” because those “rich” are not paying their “fair share” in a country in which the top 1% of earners pay 40% of the income taxes while generating 21% of the income, such outcries have little to do with Mr. Trump.   Such a result can only have come about through political manipulation of people who apparently are bored by the drudgery involved in thinking rather than emoting and hence are easily manipulated.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DEMOCRATS REALLY DON’T LIKE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE, AND SAVED, A FEW BUCKS, DO THEY?

 

5/26/21

 

Yours truly has long suspected that the Democrats, and not a few Republicans, don’t like people making money without their blessing.   Furthermore, the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the Republican Party especially seem to despise people who not only have made money but have managed to resist the temptation to spend with the utter silliness that characterizes so much of American society and put a few dollars away.   Why else would the Democrats try to remove whatever incentives exist for people to make money, save some of the money, invest that money, and hence help build a strong economy?  

 

The Biden administration designs on the capital gains tax are merely the latest manifestation of this ultimately self-destructive Democratic infatuation with sticking it to people who are successful.   They have to know that they will raise little or no revenue by increasing the capital gains tax, so why do it?   I suspect it is part of a larger plan to get “the rich,” this time for real.

 

What the Democrats and more than a few Republicans don’t understand is that, in order for a free-market system to work, some people have to make a lot of money.   Inevitably, they, we, and most people won’t like a lot of the people who will get rich in a free market system; after all, in some, but not as many as some suppose, cases, many of the qualities that serve to make a person rich are not the same qualities that endow them with a high degree of likeability.   Even yours truly finds many of the “rich” to be silly and shallow, people with whom I am glad I don’t have to spend any time.  But what you or I think of certain people has no bearing on their ability to make things and/or provide that people want to buy.  Fortunately, our system of free enterprise does not demand that its participants be genuine humanitarians or even pleasant people; if it did, we’d be a much less rich society.

 

Of course, there is an element in the Democratic Party that would prefer to ditch the free enterprise system altogether, and one suspects that if there were a few votes in it, there would be more than a few GOPers who would go along with such imbecility.   But that is another issue.

 

I wrote this letter on the capital gains tax to the Wall Street Journal on April 26; it was published on May 3:

 

 

 

4/26/21

 

Both Larry Lindsey (“Biden Taxes for Punishment’s Sake,” Opinion, 4/26/21) and the Journal editorial writers (“The Dumbest Tax Increase,” Review and Outlook, 4/26/21) make the point that the proposed Biden capital gains tax increase will, in all likelihood, reduce revenue.   Both articles conclude that one of Mr. Biden’s motives in proposing the increase is to punish those who save and invest. 

 

One does not have to give the Biden economic and political brain trust too much credit, however, to propose another motive for proposing this seemingly pointless and economically destructive tax increase.    When it becomes apparent that the tax increase is actually reducing revenue, the Biden team will present this outcome as an argument for taxing unrealized capital gains, long a goal of the Democratic left.   Since the “rich” will be able to “escape” this “fair” level of taxation by exploiting “loopholes” (i.e., not selling their stocks), the “just goals” of the tax must be met by eliminating this “loophole” by taxing unrealized gains.

 

One might argue that denizens of the Democrat left don’t fully grasp economics, but one could never argue that they don’t know their politics.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

“RUNNIN’ SOUTH ON DuSABLE DRIVE, HEADING INTO TOWN…” ?

 

5/26/21

 

Yours truly has to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is the 1971 Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah ditty “Lake Shore Drive.”   The song never fails to bring a tear to my eye, probably because so much of my youth was spent driving up and down Lake Shore Drive long past the hour at which, as my cop friend like to say, nothing good happens.   Most of those stories best remain unwritten, though they may surface in the book on which I am working.   

 

Here, however, is an innocuous story involving that tune: Shortly after we moved to Naperville, now some 27 years ago, the marquee of a bar I would drive past on Ogden Avenue on my way to the train declared “Friday night, one night only, Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah.”    Hmm.   Since “Lake Shore Drive” turned out to be a medley of that trio’s hit, I wonder what they did for their, I presume, at least hour long gig.   Did they get up and play “Lake Shore Drive,” wait for the crowd to yell “Play LSD again, you mothers!,” or something like that, and play it again…about twenty times?  By that time having been long past the age at which I frequented establishments that served strong drink and mediocre rock’n’roll, I never satisfied that curiosity.

 

But I digress.

 

It looks like the Chicago City Council is going to re-name outer Lake Shore Drive “DuSable Drive” in order to honor Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the first non-native to set up shop, almost literally, in Chicago.   Like many of my fellow Chicagoans, I am not for the name change.   Lake Shore Drive, besides being the world’s most beautiful stretch of urban road, would be Chicago’s most iconic street were it not for Western Avenue, once, and maybe still, the longest urban street in the world, running from Howard Street on the northern border of Chicago to 119^th Street on the southern border of Chicago.  And that is only the Chicago portion of Western; it runs well into Harvey, home of the Dells (which, by the way, were never known as “The Mighty Dells” back when they were in the business of producing doo-wop and R&B hits with near boring regularity; the adjective “Mighty” in connection with the Dells only accrued to that pre-eminent vocal group when they became an object of fascination with the public TV crowd about fifteen years ago, but there I go again.), on the south and probably into several north shore communities in the north, but I wouldn’t be the go-to guy on streets north of town.   That I grew up about a block and a half from 119^th and Western might have something to do with my judgment on the relative iconography of Western Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, but, again, and for the last time in this post, I digress.

 

Besides changing the name of Chicago’s, and the world’s, most scenic street, the effort to change outer Lake Shore Drive would be to cave into the whims of a, to put it nicely, fickle crowd.  One can foresee all kinds of future problems by catering to this group of history class also-rans.   So I sent the following letter to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune; the Sun-Times ran it on May 3; the Tribune did not run it:

 

 

4/29/21

 

Suppose that the city does decide to rename the Outer Drive for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable.   How long do you suppose it will take the self-appointed guardians of all that is woke and virtuous to decide that Mr. DuSable, as the first permanent, non-indigenous settler in our area, was an exploiter of native peoples and consequently demand that DuSable Drive be renamed? 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

 

RAHM EMANUEL AND THE OMNIPRESENCE, AND OMNIPOTENCE, OF GOVERNMENT

 

5/26/21

 

Former Chicago Mayor and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, for whatever merits he might display as one of the last sober-minded Democrats of (in his case former) prominence in his Party, suffers from the same affliction that has burrowed its way into every Democrat and most Republicans in “public life,” to wit…everything starts, sustains itself, and ends with government.   While this is a troubling feature among Democrats, it is IN a Democrats’ nature to see everything through the public lens; the Democrats are, as we are seeing so demonstrably in the Biden Administration, the party of government, and the bigger the better.  However, this focus on government as the source of all that life has to offer is far more saddening among Republicans, who are supposed to the be the party of free enterprise.   Sadly, and long before Trump became the herald of the message of impatience with the marketplace and therefore the necessity of incessantly tinkering with said marketplace, those GOPers who had chosen to pursue “public service” had backgrounds remarkably similar to those of their Democratic rivals, backgrounds heavy with positions on the public payroll and bereft of experience in the private sector in which they purport to believe so fervently.   But I digress.

 

The point of this letter that I sent to the Wall Street Journal, and that the Journal published on April 27, is that Mr. Emanuel, who described himself in the cited article as a “sage,” is especially infected by this myopic view of the world, ascribing economic and financial cycles to the political parties that had so little to do with any of them:

 

 

4/21/21

 

Self-described “sage” Rahm Emanuel makes the same mistake as most other politicians and almost all Democrats, i.e., ascribing everything that goes on economically or financially in terms of the politics of the situation and the policies of those who have chosen politics as a lifelong profession.   (“Not Every ‘Serious Crisis’ Is Alike,” Opinion, 4/19/21)

 

Among many other such attributions, Mr. Emanuel talks about the “Republican recession” and “Democratic prosperity.” Mr. Emanuel does not consider for a moment that the aforementioned recessions could have been caused by things beyond the politicians’ control, such as, in the case of the recession Mr. Emanuel ascribes to Mr. Trump, the COVID pandemic, and, in the cases of the prosperity for which he credits Mr. Obama, however halting it might have been, market forces that in fact would have delivered stronger recoveries had it not been for government meddling.

 

One cannot blame Mr. Emanuel, who has spent his life in “public service,” for looking at everything through the lens of politics and the actions of the government; it is a trait endemic to those in his profession.  But neither should we be so willing to place such trust, and such enormous power, in the hands of people, even “sages” like Mr. Emanuel, with such a myopic view of the world.

 

 

Mark M. Quinn

 

 

 

 

 

I WAS AWAKENED THIS MORNING TO THE NEWS THAT MY CHILDHOOD PARISH IS, ER, CONSOLIDATING

 

3/10/21

I was awakened this morning to a report on Chicago’s WBBM Newsradio that my childhood parish, St. Walter, is being closed.   Okay, technically, it’s not being closed; it is being “consolidated” with the neighboring St. Benedict in Blue Island and the reasonably nearby St. Peter Claver in Robbins into one parish to be named later.   However, as veteran reporter Bernie Tafoya put it, regular Masses will be held only at St. Benedict, St. Benedict Pastor Monsignor Dennis Lyle will be the pastor of the new parish, and, while St. Walter will remain a sacred space and will be used for funerals, school Masses, and the like, there will be no regular Sunday or weekday Masses there.    So, terminology aside, St. Walter is being closed.

 

A few months ago, this would have come as no surprise.   For years now, every time the Archdiocese of Chicago announced school and/or parish closings, I listened attentively, nearly certain that St. Walter would be on the list.   It is, and was, even in its heyday, back when yours truly was in school there, a small parish, built for the baby boom.   The entire parish covers roughly only a square mile.   The church is relatively small.   The school originally had twelve classrooms and, at its peak, we had fifty students, give or take a few, in each classroom.   Now the school has been reconfigured with fewer classrooms and has about 100 students, give or take a few, about the number that Sisters Monica and Jeremy handled in two of the original classrooms.   St. Walter is a small parish getting smaller, and always operated in the shadow of nearby gargantuan parishes like St. Cajetan, St. Benedict, St. Barnabas, and St. John Fisher.   When our students in one of the many Catholic high schools that were available to us on the south (or, in yours truly’s case, the west) side were asked what parish we were from, we usually had to explain where St. Walter was.    Students from the aforementioned giants were relieved of this burden; everyone knew, say, St. Barnabas while St. Walter was generally identified with something like “just south of St. Cajetan.”   That’s okay; we were content with quality over quantity.   But I digress.

 

In January of this year, however, we got the news that St. Walter School was consolidating with St. Benedict School, with lower grades going to St. Walter and upper grades going to St. Benedict.   This was taken, at least by yours truly, as good news; the two schools could concentrate resources to better serve their increasingly economically challenged students.    And, given that the school would continue in some capacity, it was assumed, at least by yours truly, that St. Walter Parish would continue to soldier on.   So, in the wake of the school announcement of only a few months ago, the closing of St. Walter Parish came as something of an ironic and strange surprise.

 

For a number of reasons, this is not going to be one of those “How dare the Archdiocese close my parish!” diatribes that pop up like kudzu in the wake of such closings.   First, I have little standing to write such a piece.   While I proudly went to St. Walter School and the Springfield Dominicans and their lay colleagues did wonderful things for me, like teaching me to read, write, calculate, and behave, the last of which took a long time to sink in, my connection to the parish is clearly not as great as those who live there.   While, off the top of my head, I can name four of my classmates who still live in the parish (Dan Niersbach (Sorry if I’ve butchered that spelling, Dan!), John Barajas, Tom DuBois, and Mark Maloney, I live nowhere near St. Walter.   I stopped going to church there in about seventh grade.   My mom had something of a disagreement with the “new” pastor at the time.  I won’t name the late good Father; most former and current parishioners know already know his name and he wasn’t the most popular guy in the parish.   That he succeeded the founding pastor, who, despite a reputation for gruffness, had found his way into most of the parishioners’ hearts, probably didn’t help him win the hearts and minds of his flock.    At any rate, believe me, once you got on the wrong side of my mom, you stayed there.    So we started going to church at Sacred Heart, which sits about 100 feet east of the eastern boundary of St. Walter, and I have been going to Sacred Heart ever since.   Our kids were all confirmed at Sacred Heart.  I am a lector and Minister of Communion at Sacred Heart.   While I used to go there at least once a month, in these COVID restricted times I find myself going there just about every week; from my experience, the-powers-that-be seem to take COVID more seriously in the Archdiocese of Chicago than they do out here in the Diocese of Joliet.   But, again, I digress.   Going to Sacred Heart results in my driving through St. Walter Parish, and right by the church and school, on a nearly weekly basis.   So there’s that connection.   Further, my parents, despite having moved out of the neighborhood decades ago, were buried from St. Walter.   I generally go to reunions, formal and informal, we have for our class and honorary members thereof, and the 2005 50^th All School Reunion, held in the church parking lot, was one of the best parties I’ve attended in my life.   Further, I am in touch with a lot of my classmates and others from the neighborhood.   More on this later.   Finally, when COVID restrictions and what I considered the lax approach to the pandemic displayed by parishes out here combined with an inability to get to Sacred Heart forced me to “attend” Mass on television, I send my weekly contributions to St. Walter.   So it’s not as if I have no extant connection to the place.

 

The second reason this is not a “Don’t Close My Church!” screed is the realities the Archdiocese faces.  The demographics simply are not in our favor.   Fewer people go to church, fewer people still go to Catholic Mass regularly, and the population, Catholic and non-Catholic, of the city is falling.   We can’t keep every parish open and St. Walter is a logical place to close for the reasons I outlined above; it is small, was seemingly purpose built for the baby boom, and is surrounded by bigger parishes that themselves could use more parishioners.    Also, though I may be off a year or two on this, St. Walter was established in 1953 and the church and school were completed in 1955.   Our founding pastor, Father A.W. Peterson, who referred to himself as “the Swede,” was a very practical man who spent every dollar like it was his own; consequently, the church and school can best be described as purposeful.   They are solid structures intended to serve their function in an economically efficient manner.    They are by no means ornate like some of the churches and schools in the old neighborhoods.  A friend from St. Ignatius High School, Ed Figlewicz, grew up in St. Adalbert’s Parish in Pilsen, which, while still standing, was closed several years ago.  That was a 100 plus year-old parish and church that was stunningly beautiful, an architectural masterpiece built with the pennies of Polish immigrants and maintained with the pennies of Mexican immigrants.  I had another friend at Ignatius, now Dr. Ted Walczak, of whom I have lost track, who went to St. John of God about four blocks south of the stockyards.   That, too, was an architectural masterpiece built by Polish immigrants and it was torn down years ago.   I could name several more of such awe-inspiring churches that were not spared when the Archdiocese was faced with having to close parishes.  As much as I feel an attachment to St. Walter, it is a new and relatively modern parish compared to those old ethnically based parishes.   And, for now at least, St. Walter is not going to be razed.

 

So while I won’t get up on some kind of soap box and demand that St. Walter remain open and, until the January announcement regarding the school, I was fully anticipating this day, I am deeply saddened by its closure for reasons that many of you, being Catholics who grew up in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and before, can easily understand.  In that era, the parish, with its Masses, other Sacraments, school, and social events, was an enormous component of your life.   Again, we weren’t one of the big ethnic parishes in one of the old neighborhoods; the section of St. Walter in which I grew up (west of Western from 115^th to 119^th) could almost be described as a kind of Naperville of its day…a new neighborhood (in the ‘50s) of brand-new homes adjoining an older, more established neighborhood east of Western.   But our parents brought with them from those old neighborhoods the traditions with which they had been imbued, the most salient of which was the primacy of the parish.   So we went to school at St. Walter.   We went to Mass at St. Walter (in our case, until about seventh grade, as I mentioned above, and that exodus didn’t make us all that unique among St. Walter parishioners at the time, but that is grist for another mill).   Our moms belonged to the St. Walter Women’s Club.  Our dads belonged to the Holy Name Society and played cards with a group of guys called the Retlaws.  (Spell it backwards.)   We played football and basketball for St. Walter School.   When people asked you where you lived, you didn’t say “around 118^th and Western; you said “St. Walter,” regardless of whether you were Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish and, had St. Walter been a bigger parish, everyone would know where that was.   By the way, the latter three groups were collectively known as “Publics.”   Why?    As little kids, we reasoned that we were Catholics because we went to Catholic school, so our friends who went to public school must be Publics.   It sounded quite reasonable at the time and the name stuck even when we were old enough to know better.   That should give those of you who are not familiar with the culture how engrained such things were.

 

Further, we still identify with St. Walter and still keep in touch with the people with whom we went to school.   In my case, I see Jim Carroll at Sacred Heart at least a few times a month.   Over the last few months, I’ve had a small medical setback and nearly instantly heard from four guys (five if you count Jim, who got the word out), Joe Sparacio, Tom DuBois, Paul Watson, and Kevin Scannell from St. Walter.   In that conversation, Joe pointed out that he is my oldest friend; we used to play in the home-made sandbox in my backyard before either of us even started school at St. Walter.   I now and again share stories with Mark Maloney, the only guy with whom I went to kindergarten (We were all “publics” in kindergarten; St. Walter didn’t have a kindergarten.), grade school, and high school, and with whom I would have gone to college had either of us gone to our second choice.  I don’t think I enjoy conversing with anybody more than I enjoy conversing with Mike Graber, one of my closest friends from my class.  When I get off the phone with Mike, my wife says, calmly and confidently, “You were on the phone with Mike Graber, right?”  She knows from the nearly incessant laughter these calls generate.    I’m sorry I missed Rich Ruebe, another Walter’s guy who was my college roommate, the last time he was in town from Texas; I won’t miss him next time.   I picked up the phone a few months ago to hear from John McErlean, another Walter’s guy, known as “Big John,” who recently retired as a captain from the Chicago Fire Department.  The call made my day, even though we didn’t talk about much of anything other than how the world was going to hell in a handbasket, one of my favorite conversational topics.   I recall a weekend when my wife and I were in Lake Geneva.  I was in the bathroom when my wife called out “Hey, get out here; your buddy John McErlean is on the news;” he had just emerged from a literally burning building from which he had saved a little girl.   Ed James, one of our more studious classmates, used to run a pharmacy in the neighborhood, and seeing him when the guys would get together was always a joy.  While I always enjoy running into Jimmy Cavallini at our occasional formal or informal reunions, he sometimes get overly enthusiastic about recounting tales of our youth best left untold, usually involving guys like Pat O’Sullivan, Tim Kelleher, and Paul Griffin, and plenty of Budweiser.  Whenever I see John Barajas, it’s so good to see him, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry just thinking of the stories he and I could tell of our perhaps not optimally spent youths.     When Jay O’Reilly, maybe the most loved guy in our class, died about a year ago, just before COVID hit, the funeral parlor was jam-packed with people…most of whom were from St. Walter.   And I got to see guys there like Marc Gustafson, whom I hadn’t seen since eighth grade.   My brother-in-law and sister bought a car a few months ago from Paul Napleton, of course, another St. Walter guy.  Paul informed me that two of the Lazzara siblings, Al and Nancy, sent their regards.   I regularly correspond with Mary Beth Turek, who was Mary Beth Delaplane back at St. Walter, still hoping that some of her brains would somehow transmit themselves to me over e-mail; I think she has an IQ of about 9000 and went on to ace the engineering program at Notre Dame back when women in engineering programs could be counted on a couple of hands.   I saw Mila Grady, who was Mila Wasik (I hope I haven’t butchered that spelling as well!) when we went to St. Walter, at my daughter’s graduation from the University of Iowa Nursing College; Mila is, or at least was at the time, on the faculty there.   I occasionally run into Barb Prindiville and the former Mary Ellen Tatro, now Mary Ellen Tatro-Mendoza, who went to St. Walter with my sister, Maribeth, at Sacred Heart.  And, finally, Tom DuBois’ parents have long been like a second set of parents to me, and to many of the “kids” at St. Walter; they have been to all of our kids’ confirmations and, before COVID, my wife and I would visit them after Mass and bring them Communion, and hope to resume that practice soon.  I’m running on here and I doubtless have unintentionally left out several people whom I will regret leaving out as soon as I publish this, but I would have run on a lot more had I mentioned the people I talked with at the “big party” in 2005, the aforementioned reunion in the parking lot, that people are still talking about 16 years later.   I mention all the people I have mentioned because they, along with many others, are so important to me and I am still in touch with them…fifty years after graduating from school with them.   That is what growing up in a parish, at least in the ‘60s and ‘70s, did to you.   And, by the way, if you’ve had the pleasure, or will have the pleasure, of reading my books (See below.), you’ll recognize some of these names; many of the characters are named, more or less randomly, after people I grew up with in and around the neighborhood.  And, again, I apologize to those who have somehow slipped through the cracks; they are all important to me. 

 

I understand why the Archdiocese has to close parishes.   And, though I don’t live there any more and hence don’t have many grounds for opining one way or the other, I can see why St. Walter was selected for closure, which it calls “consolidation.”   Further, this news certainly didn’t come out of the blue, though the school announcement in January certainly threw us a curveball.   Finally, our tradition at St. Walter is perhaps not as rich as those of older, more ethnically cohesive parishes.   Still, and many of you can understand this, the parish in which we grew up was a focal point of our lives.   I won’t be so dramatic as to say that when the parish dies a piece of us dies, but it certainly hurts.   Thank God the good things, and especially the good friends, that St. Walter provided us live on in our hearts, minds, and lives.

 

 

 

 

 

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work, or at least used to work, in Chicago and Illinois politics…and to see a few names you might recognize.

JUST CALL IT “DEMOCRATIZATION” AND ALL THIS MARKET CRAZINESS BECOMES WONDERFUL, RIGHT?

 

2/1/21

Most of you have noticed that I haven’t been writing much of late for a variety of good reasons, largely centering around the decline of interest in the musings of people who deal in reason rather than emotion.   Rationalizations sell, rationality doesn’t.   Echo chambers are popular, alternative ways of looking at things aren’t.

All that having been said, many people have asked me for my opinions on what’s going on in the markets with the GME fun and games and related silliness.   While, as you might guess, yours truly has more than a few opinions on the matter, most are rather esoteric and of limited interest to most of my readers.   However, something I wrote to one of my closest friends, a guy I used to work with and have known for nearly 30 years, is sufficiently general that I thought my readers, whether financially oriented or not, would enjoy it.   As always, I’m not writing for agreement or affirmation; I’m writing to get people to think, an activity that seems to have fallen out of favor of late:

 

I'm getting a little tired of, and a little nervous about, commentators on CNBC and elsewhere talking about how wonderful it is that the market has been "democratized."   The underlying assumption behind that is that everyone participating has at least a minimum degree of knowledge or insight AND is willing to take his or her losses when things go south.  I suspect neither assumption is correct.   I wish somebody had the stones to say that attaching the word "democracy," or some derivation thereof, to some argument does not automatically endow that argument with sweetness and light.   Someone should be the adult in the room and say that having a bunch of kids play with their Robin Hood accounts when they tire of their video games is dangerous, and especially when they rationalize such behavior by attaching it to some kind of cause.   But nobody wants to offend the "young people" out there and somehow this society has been imbued with the idea that we are ALL equal in EVERY respect, including knowledge of or insights into particular fields.   We are somehow embarrassed to admit that, indeed, knowledge is valuable and experience and study genuinely do improve our abilities in matters that we have studied and/or in which we have experience.   But nobody of consequence says that.  People are cowards, and cowards cower.