Why do Progressives Hate Italian Americans?

Columbus - Genocidal Genoan
Democrat Ameya Pawar says that if elected Illinois governor, he would work to have Illinois rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Balbo - Gotta Go!
 When a reporter demanded to know where the mayor stands on the monument given to Chicago by fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Emanuel got visibly annoyed and started to lose his cool.

“You don’t have to ask me what my position is on fascism. Thank you. I’m against fascism. Take a chill pill, will you?” the mayor said.

Why do Progressives need to insult Italian Americans at every turn?  They discovered the Land of the Free and Home of Brave.  Italian Americans  fought in every American conflict for freedom from the Revolution to today's war on Islamist Terror.  Thomas Jefferson formed the United States Marine Corps Band, "The President's Own," around fourteen Italian musicians. Italian Americans, like Brigadier General Luigi Palma Di Cesnola, Medal of Honor recipient, helped end slavery.

Enrico Fermi, Henry Mancini, Joe Di Maggio, Mother Cabrini, Frank Capra and the brilliant Camille Paglia have all added to American culture and its benefit to mankind.

In World War I, 400,000 Italian Americans went to war under our flag, though they made up only 4% of the national population and 10% of AEF casualties were Italian Americans.  They came home to Palmer Raids  sparked by the great Progressive Woodrow Wilson's anti-foreigner paranoia.

Today, in our goofy Progressive Politically Correct SJW Kutur Kampf which has but erased religion in public dialog, as had the secularist states of Progressive Europe in 1870's,   iconoclasm, intolerance and  dystopian initiatives to erase history have leaped from the Red Neck Confederacy to Italian American celebrations.

The statue to Balbo has stood on Lake Shore Drive since 1933 (seven years before WWII).  Only now, with political skinks like Terry McAullife of Virginia and Alderman Ed Burke of Chicago getting into the iconoclasm business, is Balbo's column an existential crisis.  Progressives always seem to be the most energetic when public scrutiny turns their way.

Columbus Day has long been a Progressive whipping boy - He was not the first to sail the Ocean Blue, He was a Nasty Viceroy, he hated indigenous peoples, or so some Howard Zinn contrarians decided Columbus to be.

Balbo is only the latest Progressive assault on Italian Americans, since Jane Addams erased Mother Cabrini.

Italo Balbo was an Italian aviator who flew an armada of seaplanes from Italy to Chicago. No mean feat that, in 1927.  However, Balbo's exploit helped make Mussolini Il Duce, or so say the Atticus Finch crowd.

Losers lose history. The Rebs and the Fascists are losers.  However, lost in all the fog created by the hot breath from the moral high ground is the fact that AntiFA activists support HAMAS and Hamas is a child of Hitler's favorite Muslim - Grand Mufti.

The United Nations, long the darling of tinpot dictators and psychopaths issued this dire warning on American racism, “We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said Anastasia Crickley, chair of the committee.

 Irish UN harpy Anastasia Crickly forgets that the IRA was armed and aided by Admiral Canaris all through WWII and that the IRA founder of Amnesty International was a Nazi collaborator.

No one is taking down any Shamrocks.

Italian Americans get it good an hard from the hypocrites and weasels, but Italian Americans are better people people than those who insult them

History proves that.

Bruce Rauner Runs Squarely into the Embrace of His Old Pals - Cook County Oligarchs

A day after crafting a controversial statement citing Gov. Bruce Rauner’s position as a “white male,” the governor’s new communications staff has been ousted — with more exits on the way, according to multiple sources. Sun Times

Those multiple sources of the Illinois Deep Stater, tagged as GOP operatives. 

Who's gonna vote for a Billionaire?  You are.  JB or Bruce.  Pick one.  Not difference between either plutocrat.  Both have made piles  of spondulix in their happy careers around the Corporate/Government trough; both want the very same thing - to maintain Illinois as a place where the many are looted by the few. 

I have delightful chats with a lovely young lady of my acquaintance who holds that " Bruce Rauner is doing everything he can to stop the madness."

I offer my patented Pastor Pfleger Rejoinder (PPR) to the the gushes of the sheeple, "He's done so much for  his people" - Examples, please.

(crickets)

Bruce Rauner is a place holder.  He is holding the place for JB Pritzker.  Proof, you may ask of my wild accusation, ?  The news.

Just today, we have this nugget concerning Rauner's firing of communications staff with ties to the Illinois Policy Institute.

News of the exits spread throughout the political realm on Wednesday night. One senior Republican operative called the ousting a sign the governor has realized he made a “mistake.”
“The governor and First Lady have finally admitted they made a colossal mistake in hiring these right wing ideologues,” the operative said. “One can only hope for the sake of our state government they will make better choices in the future.”
The Rauner administration shakeup began on July 10 when Rauner unexpectedly fired his chief of staff, Richard Goldberg. Goldberg was swiftly replaced by Kristina Rasmussen, former president and CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute. That sparked the exits of at least 20 employees, many of whom left because they didn’t believe in the direction the governor was taking in hiring members of the conservative think tank.( emphases my own) 

And horseshit remains the staple diet of Illinois!!!!

From the get-go the Democrats and their think tanks have ginned up the ire of the media to do-in all Illinois Policy Institute hires by Governor Bruce.  The Dude abides.

Thay Gone!!!!!!!!!!  Bruce is back, Baby!!!!!!

Rauner was down in the polls of GOP voters and hired people from the only accurate critic of Looting Illinois - the Illinois Policy Institute.  The Paul Simon Institute is a poling organ of the Illinois Democrat Party and sets the table for every idiotic piece of legislation rammed through Springfield with the tag line - IT CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!

The cartoon accurately depicted the concerns of both house of the Illinois legislature which brought screams of racism from the race-addicted wolves of all colors.

Race is weapon of finance.  No one knows finance like Mayor Emanuel and responded to Bruce Rauner's spinelessness with audible heft, “The cartoon issued by the governor’s allies at the Illinois Policy Institute is unambiguously racist,” Emanuel said in a statement. “We can give no quarter to racism, and there can be no justification for leaders unwilling to stand up and call out racist acts. For a man so eager to speak his mind so often, the governor’s silence is deafening.”

Dance with me, Bruce!

The governor's silence is as meretricious as a Pfleger Presser!!!!  Bruce Plays.

Illinois remains screwed blue'd and tattooed.  JB will picking your bones clean at the behest of the Illinois Oligarchs and Bruce will clean up.

Rainbow Fascism "You go out of your way to misunderstand each other." with help from our Media

If, in theological terms, communism was the temptation to change stones into bread, if national socialism was a genetic and materialistic perversion of the idea of the "peculiar people" elect of God, then rainbow fascism has an aspect of a materialized Pentecost run riot, from its seemingly endless ability to incorporate subordinate ideologies (New Age, environmentalism, feminism) to its claim to bestow complete freedom within "diversity." This "white noise" babble of a multitude of voices, each in its own distinctive way expressing the same vacuity, may indeed turn out to be the "end of history" prophesied by Francis Fukuyama. That the United  States—responding to an ill-conceived summons to "national greatness"—would find itself the indispensable midwife for the  birth of such a monster should be repugnant to any real patriot,  to any true son of our fatherland. James George Jatras Chronicle, June 1998 (19-22)

 That America may soon be gone with the wind. The violence at Charlottesville, the pulling down of a Confederate memorial by a mob in Durham, the removal of four monuments from Baltimore (which has one of America’s highest homicide rates) under the cowardly cloak of night, and calls for getting rid of many more are simultaneously the death throes of the old America built on one national concept and the birth pangs of a new, borderless, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious, multisexual, historical, fake «America» now aborning in violence and lawlessness.

He who says A must say B. When one accepts demonization of part of our history and placing those who defend it beyond the pale of legitimate discourse, one should hardly be surprised when the arrogant fury of the victors is unleashed. That takes two forms: the nihilist street thugs of «Antifa» and «Black Lives Matter», and the authorities (both governmental and media, a/k/a the Swamp) who confer on them immunity for violent, criminal behavior. The former are the shock troops of the latter.
They’ve been at it for months, well before Charlottesville, across the country, with nary a peep from the party that supposedly has uniform control over the federal government. Our First Amendment rights as Americans end where a black-clad masked thug chooses to put his (or her or indeterminate «gender») fist or club. To paraphrase U.S. Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott, loyalists of the old America have no rights which the partisans of the new one are bound to respect. Where’s the Justice Department probe of civil rights violations by this organized, directed brutality? (Or maybe there will be one, including looking into George Soros’s connection. If not, what’s the point of having RICO?)   by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation, (emphases my own)

Henry V - the stirring and arguably the greatest propaganda drama in human letters - has a wonderful  scene where Blakanized Britons ( Irish, Welsh, Scot and English) are mining the walls of a biesieged French town.  The Welsh Captain Fleuellen, who shares the Welsh blood with King Harry, insults the Irish Captain Mcmorris:

FLUELLEN
Captain Macmorris, I think, see—correct me if I’m wrong—there are not many of your nation—
MACMORRIS
My nation? What is my nation? It’s a villain and a bastard and a coward and a rascal. What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?
FLUELLEN
Captain Macmorris, if you take my words in some way other than how they were meant, see, I’ll have to think you’re not treating me with the good will you ought to, see, since I am as good a man as yourself, both in the practice of war and in my country of origin and in other respects.
MACMORRIS
I do not know that you are as good a man as myself. So, by Christ, I’ll cut off your head.
GOWER
Now, now, both of you gentlemen! You go out of your way to misunderstand each other.

The two Celts are by blood of one race and by national origin, antagonists.  The Englishman Gower sorts them out.

So it is in Trump America - a House sub-divided.

The Rainbow Fascism warned of in the post Iron Curtain 1990's has come to pass, it seems to me.  Americans are moved via the laxative of race, gender, political and cultural correctness to do harm to their neighbors - punch hate, hate hate and take it to the streets.

The Democrat Party and the Republican Party have morphed government into a later-day Wiemar Republic geldlings and go-alongs, indistinguishable and in concert.

Last night's Trump rally in Phoenix was an attempt by a ruptured President to speak his cause - whatever that is.

The reaction to the speech by and absolute moron of a journalist, CNN"S Don Lemon, is symptomatic of the Rainbow Fascism gripping the nation.



The Swamp, the Deep State  and the Media  express an opinion formed by committee and mouthed by dim bulbs like Don Lemon.

History is fast becoming and agreed upon iconography that supports the message.

My Nation?  My Nation is getting all too goofy and all too cowardly and all too foolish.   It is quickly becoming The Nation where a Don Lemon keeps his job.

A Nation where people go out of their way to misunderstand one another.  You say A and You Must say B - that is the fruit of lovely Lemon Tree formerly known as the United States.

Northwestern Prof and Test-Tube Baby Wyndham Lathem Returns to Chicago!

Wyndham Lathem was born August 10, 1974. He completed his AB in biology at Vassar College (1992-96). He was a research technician at Rockefeller University from 1996 to 1998 in the laboratory of James E. Darnell, Jr., and earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in microbiology (2003) in the laboratory of Rod Welch. Wiki entry

Wyndham Willoughby Lathem is his name and he was born and the immediately graduated from . . . Vasser.  Vasser went co-ed in 1969 - five years before Wyndham was born . . somewhere.

The biggest mystery in this summer-break slaughter on North State is the Northwestern University and Chicago Media code of silence surrounding the place of birth and the wonder years of Wyndham Willoughby Lathem.

• We know he didn't go to De La Salle, or he might have been groomed for Mayor
• We know he is not a member of Polish Highlanders
• We kno0w he never belonged to the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge
• We know that Professor WWL didn't 'play some 'Ball' at Mount Carmel
• We know that he is not from Amish Country near Arcola
• Could he be a Yellahammer from Custer Park?
• Had he a membership at Essex Rod and Gun Club?
• Did Wyndham take the Mikva Challenge?
• Was young Wyndham a 'test-tube' baby?

We know that his boon chum from Old Blighty was on holiday and that all and sundry (back home) are shocked . . .shocked, I say.  to learn in the Guardian that Andrew Warren, an Oxford University, bean counter, might have possibly had a hand in this murder-most-foul of young hair-dresser Trenton Cornell-Duranleau.

Was Professor Purple Wildcat, unbeknownst to his Pukka Pomey Pal ( Capt. Andy -above),  a Deep State player as well as a Lake Geneva Library patron?

Well the boys are gonna be back in town!

Expect no news.

Jimmy Hoffa's gravesite is easier to find,  thanks to the Medill Omerta Code. 

Telling the Teacher to Shut Up, If He Knows What's Good for Him.

Having a classroom full of willful, energetic and smart teenagers listen to your lesson with attention, wonder and, if possible affirmation,  is a joy beyond imagination.   Having done so for forty-two years, is a satisfying career that continues at a much slower pace.

I was taught to teach honestly - give the full story.  I did, I hope.

One of the secret pleasures of Facebook ( that is the extent of my social network: can't text and I use an "Old Guy" flip phone . . .for Phone Calls!1!).  Since my daughters encouraged me to open a page, I have reconnected with hundreds of kids ( now in their 40's, 50's, and 30's) who sat packed in historically uncomfortable desks and bought what I was selling - literature, philosophy, history, shared truth and the world contributions to leading a good life.  I taught Catch 22, A Separate Peace, Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Confederacy of Dunces, Paradise,Vanity Fair, Grapes of Wrath. USA Tilogy, It Can't Happen Here,  Canterbury Tales, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Adventures of Augie March, Native Son, Invisible Man, the plays of Shakespeare ( especially the English War of Roses and the Roman Plays) Euripides, Aristophanes,Aeschylus, Sophocles, Raisin in the Sun, the philosophical works of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau. Voltaire, Berkley, Hume and Russell's History of Western Philosophy.  The historical texts of Xenophon, Thucydides, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Francis Parker, Henry Adams, Malcom X, Barbara Tuchman fleshed out the a study of man at his best and worst.

I introduced my students to a book The Peoples History of the United States in 1980 and explained that it was Red nonsense in clever packaging.

I taught Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here a dystopian America addicted to fascism.  Strangely some of the kids who loved that rather brittle and sloppy novel are now devotees of later day Buzz Windrip's who are telling everyone to get in line, get on the right side of history, shout with Move On. org, Organizing for Action, AntiFa fascists and the book burner historian Howard Zinn.

None of this stuff is new. It is merely 1930's American Stalinism in velcro pants. 

• If you are not with us; you are against us!  
• We have the ghost of Tom Joad and Pete Seeger walking before us!  
• We are the People. 
• The Boss needs you; you don't need the boss.
• Organize the workers to control the use of their labor power,
• Workers of the world, awaken! 
• Which Side are you On???!

A few of my brightest students, sadly swallowed Howard Zinn whole and subsist on his diet of class envy, race baiting and scab yanking American history.

A former student bemoans the fact that I voted for Trump.  Get in line.  Now, in order to goat my sensibilities, indicated that my vote is dog whistle for my intrinsic panophobia and hateful nature.  I'm a Nazi, a Klansman, Lynch Mob psychopath and a moral coward, this fine young gent opines.

Glad to have introduced you to the world of ideas.  They are your's to ignore.

I found his jibe unworthy of his intellect, but there you have it.  I am like the Jewish teacher of the SS man in the brilliant series The Holocaust.  "Thanks for your wisdom, but you are on the wrong side of history. Now, let me help you step up into that boxcar Herr Doktor."

I responded to his snarky reply, "You can remind when your crowd carts me off to the Reeducation Camp."

There is no getting away from it - the young man was a straight A student.

Erase history and then start erasing the people who know it.

Oh, it can happen here.  It is already happening.

President Trump Screwed Up - Big Time. The Iconoclasts Own Oxygen, Now

"the image acts or behaves as the subject itself is expected to act or behave. It makes known its wishes ... It enacts evangelical teachings, ... When attacked it bleeds, ... [and] In some cases it defends itself against infidels with physical force ..."  Byzantine art in the making: main lines of stylistic development in Mediterranean art, 3rd-7th century 1977. 

"To compare these propagandistic installations to the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial is either profoundly ignorant or deviously brazen." Eric Zorn- pencil neck geek and Chicago Tribune Columnist

Why?  To compare Canfields lime sparkling water to beer might be profoundly ignorant or deviously brazen.  Might be.

Eric Zorn likes to proclaim without substantial explanations - things just ARE with Eric Zorn; hence his title for the attack on the Rebs, Nazis, Bigots and profoundly ignorant or deviously brazen: No, in fact, removing the statue of Robert E. Lee doesn't put us on a slippery slope

Slippery Slopes are what people with common sense, schooling and good manners keep an eye out for to avoid future problems. Drinking alot of beer from dawn to dusk is a very slippery slope to chronic alcoholism.  It happens and will happen again to ladies and gents who attend services at Bob's Husky Barstool - open 7 AM.

I like Canfield's lime sparkling water.    It beats beer hollow.  I love beer for the "tingle on the T'roat" and unlike sparkling wines beer never caves in the noggin, unless one sips his Pilsner from a gallon punch bowl.

These days, I enjoy sparkling water much more than beer.  All the tingle and none of the post dissipation problems.  There are no Cook County Toni Taxes, or any Field Sobriety Test anxiety after taking the wheel with an ice-cold can in the cup-holder.

Life is good!  I can walk into the local tavern and order up a pint of the clear with a citrus wedge, beneath the iconic Guinness Toucan sign without pangs of anguish and pain for those yet enslaved by demon rum, Happy Cossack Vodka, Devil IPA, or wicked wine.

Some sober drunks get offended by billboards, bar signage and anything romanticizing strong drink.

Slipped down a nasty slope, when casino gaming opened in Indiana.  My wife died and I entertained myself with a few hands of poker.

I have a gambling problem. I don't gamble - buy lottery tickets, go to casinos, wager on the Bears, purchase raffle tickets, or play the stock market.  I follow the GA way, attend daily Mass and Holy Communion, face my problems of the day and try and let go of any and all resentments that turned me from a sweet-natured, thoughtful guy into a degenerate gambler with all the stupidity that brings.

My Dad told me that I was on a very slippery slope, but he had not gotten an advanced degree from Loyola University.  He only walked picket lines for a two cents an hour raise and had his head opened by scabs, fought Race Supremacists from Bougainville to Iwo Jima and helped create the post-war standard of living.

I read Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chaucer and Thackeray - I knew all about gambling degenerates.

Since I arrested my gaming development, Illinois has opened mini-casinos in Pizza joints, Laundromats,  Sub and coffee shops, Slot parlors and saloons.   Chicago and a few suburbs do not allow slots.  Outside of these local governments - Viva Las Vegas  in LaGrange!

Some recovering gamblers might want to go all Carrie Nation on these joints and tear down this celebration of human slavery.

A recent research reveals that in America, approximately 2.5 million adults suffer from compulsive gambling, about 3 million are considered problem gamblers, around 15 million adults are under the risk of becoming problem gamblers and 148 million fall under the low risk gambler category.

Slavery is evil.  We are all consumed with what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia last week.  A score of people were nearly killed and one young woman was murdered by a Klan/Nazi idiot.

Politicians jumped to side of the angels - anyone not carrying Tiki Torches, Swastikas, Stars and Bars Reb battle flags, or spouting Race Identity Politics rhetoric spiced with Jew-Hatred.  Folded into this hateful human goo were the 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump. The AntiFa of Altleft marshalled their junior justice leagues to confront the hate-filled White Nationalists and White Supremacists with Red Flags, mace, sticks and stones and anyone who voted for the President and thinks that erasing history is the slippery slope to genuine tyranny.

President Trump made this possible.

President Trump screwed up - Big Time, as likes to say.  The plain spoken slave to Twitter was silent.

I would have gone personally.  I would have gotten up into David Duke's  whited capped grill and run that voice of losers (Rebs & Brown Shirts) back to his flat in Moscow, where he belongs. Trump could had his secret service agents shield him among people who genuinely hate racism and wedged away the Potemkin Village commandos of the Revolutionary Communist Party, International Solidarity Movement and of course Communist Party USA. 

There is no moral equivalency - the Rebs and Nazis had the stage much longer and Reds had gone under-ground while schools dumbed down history.

Here in Chicago, where a public school teacher encouraged his students to tell the media that 'they' came up with the idea of changing the name Stephan Douglas Park to Frederick Douglas Park, because the Little Giant loved slavery more than preserving the Union, Jesse Owens who embarrassed Der Fuhrer at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is buried along with 6,000 dead Rebs at Oak Woods Cemetery on 63rd & Cottage Grove.  The 6,000 Rebs died of cholera, starvation and cold in Camp Stephan A. Douglas.

There are Confederate icons at this graveyard.  President Trump opened the door for the iconoclasts to begin tearing things up, down and out.

Trump screwed up.  He would have lost nothing if he had publicly chastised Duke and the other Aryan pipsqueaks and turned his caustic wit upon the clowns wearing storm trooper gear and vowing to save the statues of Marse Robert. Instead, Trump opened the door for more slings and arrows, leaving the people who voted for him to drain the swamp to wallow in the mud with the self-hugging later day Lloyd Garrisons - if you do not agree with me, you are worse than the white robed  bigots and should join a local Einsatzgruppen. 

Trump is as bad  at healing the nations wounds, as Obama.  Trump could have made this massacre a great moment - a defining moment.

He didn't. His wife and kid did, but the President did not.  Trump opened the door to simpering and cowardly Iconoclasts of elected office and the media to suck all of CO2 out of the atmosphere.   Governors Cuomo and McAullife,  two practiced grifters in government are leading the efforts of the morons to tear down the false idols of the Confederacy.

One of the most oleaginous ink-slingers for the Cook County Banana Republic, Eric Zorn offers his pencil neck to the vanguard of book burners, grave robbers and statue topplers.

Many readers responded to my Wednesday column calling for the removal of all public honors to the Confederacy with variations of this slippery-slope argument.
What else should be destroyed or banned in the name of moral failings, asked my correspondents triumphantly: The Roman Coliseum? Fulbright scholarships? The Declaration of Independence? The song “Dixie”? Wrigley Field? “Gone With The Wind"? . . . It’s not, however, a particularly interesting or difficult debate when it comes to those who took up arms against the United States for the purpose of preserving human slavery.

Where do we draw the line? Gee, I dunno, but somewhere well this side of the leaders of the Confederacy — the politicians and generals known almost exclusively for their prominent roles in a murderous, doomed act of mass treason.

It’s an easy distinction. Washington, Jefferson and other flawed founders built this country. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and other rebels tried to tear it apart. Unlike Washington and Jefferson, they have no significant compensating virtues or accomplishments to counterbalance their treachery and justify the numerous honors and tributes bestowed on them as symbols of Southern “heritage.”

Southerners erected many statues and monuments to such men decades after the Civil War as de facto middle fingers to those who battled segregation and demanded equal rights and opportunities for blacks.   

To compare these propagandistic installations to the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial is either profoundly ignorant or deviously brazen.

Eric draws pay from a paper that founded by the most hateful of the Nativists, Joseph Medill, who swore to hand Catholics from street lamps and later founded the American Protective Association that controlled American universities to keep out Catholics, Jews and Negroes.   This paper 'evolved' but still hates Catholics, Jews and keeps blacks snugly within the arms of cyclical poverty with policies meant to maintain the plantation.

Eric called people who objected to the legislation that ended marriage as a family consisting of a mother and father for the purpose of having children, profoundly ignorant and deviously brazen in 2012.

I will not debate the morality of various forms of private sexual conduct between consenting adults and neither should our lawmakers.
To me, immoral conduct is that which harms others, period. To you or your religious tradition, it may encompass much more, and that's fine. Advocates aren't asking you or your officiants to bless gay marriage, celebrate it or even, in your heart, to like it. They're asking you to recognize the line America tries to maintain between personal morality and the judgment of the law; between what's your business and what's none of your business.

Unless your business is making wedding cakes, and you are being sued out of business, Zorn.

Erasing history is tool of tyranny.  Stalin mastered the art.  ISIS has destroyed every vestige of Iraqi and Syrian Christianity.  Byzantine iconoclasts not only destroyed statues and icons, but murdered thousands of people.

Wrigley was a Klan supporter.  Medill was Nativist bigot.  Zorn works for the bigot's newspaper - that is some slippery slope?

Only if one happens to be profoundly ignorant or deviously brazen.

Iconoclasts Matter. I'll drink a Canfield's lime to that.

Catholic Schools, Charlottesville and The Idiot in the Classroom

One encounters very few 'idiots' in Catholic high schools.  They are led away from folly or disciplined to control their impulses.

Go to any Catholic high school next week.  Really.  Pop in on one. Go to the Office and make your presence known and listen.   You will be astounded by the . . . quiet.

Catholic schools succeed because they are free, for the most part, of idiotic policies that do nothing to help young people learn to master literature, history, math, science,music, art and theology.   The best Catholic schools have empty halls during class periods and the 36 or so actively engaged males and/or females are being engaged by someone with a command of the discipline being taught.

More than often, in single gender and many co-ed Catholic schools, those teachers also coach most of the sports and moderate the extra-curricular clubs and activities.  That is even more conducive to classroom management, because the young people engage the instructor 'beyond the classroom walls' and learn that the guy in the tie, was also struggling to get both legs over the high hurdles, while maintaining a B+ average, working part-time and coping with adolescence.   Shared goals and sweat make easy alliances and seed respect.

Catholic schools are diverse, but not daffy about it.  I have yet to witness a Selma moment at Bishop McNamara, Bishop Noll, or Brother Rice High School.  In 21 years at Leo High School, situated in Auburn Gresham and south edge of Englewood, I watched a dozen white boys from suburbs and Canaryville USA bond with hundreds of black gents from Englewood, Brainerd, Gresham, Chatham, and Grand Crossing.  The Canaryville guys took the Halsted bus from 79th to the Ville without incident, when the school vans were unavailable for transport home.  Two dozen Mexican Americans fared even better.  One white boy graduated from Leo and of the dozen or so Mexican lads, one graduated as a Gates Scholar.

There were dust ups.  The "N" word was used, back and forth in the more heated debates over Hip-Hop artists, Hillbilly music and places in the offensive line.   Some times words came to blows and both colors sat in detention,  " That Irish N@##eer ( redhead from St. Gabe's) said Vic Mensa's from O Street!!!!!   N@##ah' stays near 62nd & Stony Island. "

Such distinctions are very important to sophomore age male egos.

At Brother Rice there was even less attention made to skin and more to ego and placement in the upcoming football line-up.  One Blue-chip African American junior stands 5'6" and already has D-One colleges asking for the diminutive but elusive Seniors season highlight disc and his arch-enemy  a 6'4" offensive lineman and Blue-chip wrestler will challenge one another in every class they over ability, toughness, endurance and appeal to the fair sex.

That is the reality of American racism that I see most days.

Here is what the delicate creatures of the Chicago Tribune editorial board announce, having wached cable news for three days of coverage on the idiots and blood shed in Charlottesville, Virgini, "America does have a problem with racism, with anti-Semitism and many other forms of bigotry and intolerance. That's no secret. The question Americans must confront every day is how will they respond." Bruce Dold et al. 

The Tribune's application of the modal auxiliary assures all and sundry - America has a problem with race . . .and with Anti-Semtism ( when conflated by Zionism, Gaza, Palestinians, neo-Stalinist rhetorical flourishes, or matters of policy).

No. Charlottesville this week was a gathering of idiots left and right with an emphasis on right.

Charlottesville and Chicago Tribune editorials concerning race relations should be treated the same way a good Catholic high school teacher/coach treats someone's cherished and darling nitwit, attention demanding idiot and sophomoric time assassin - chided and isolated with warm sarcasm, until he gets with the program, " Mr. Hickey, our discussion concerns analyzing Steinbeck's monster metaphor from chapter five of The Grapes of Wrath, join us or spend some quality with Kenny moving tables for the Circle of Champions over the next two Saturdays."

The Class was not inattentive.  Hickey was an idiot . . .again. Let us not dwell on idiots, let us learn that Banks to Steinbeck were like the living dead - zombies with an insatiable appetite for human beings.

Racism : "[t]he theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race"  was only used by a human being for the first time in 1930's by Communist, abortion and gay activist Magnus Hirschfeld.

That is the root of the term.  What it truly means is something else and I do not believe that I have witnessed overt acts racism anywhere, but by a few idiots on television.  I used to see Nazi dress-up losers on Kedzie at 63rd Street but they seem to have disappeared.

Lives matter.  Tiki torches not so much.

Go to any Catholic high school and watch lives being lived and one or two malleable idiots getting straightened out.

Game of Thrones and Theology: Varys and St. Callistus I

“Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” Varys -Game of Thrones

It is matter of doubt, moreover, to no one, that the church of the apostles is the mother of all the churches, from whose ordinances it is not right that you should deviate to any extent. St. Callistus I

 Game of Thrones (GOT), like many good dramas from John Ford's 17th Century blood-tragedy T'is Pity She's a Whore to Deadwood, offer pot-holed paths to God.  

This is a Vale of Tears and so is HBO's Westeros.   As if things are not normally bad enough, Winter is Coming, or Here Already: GOT's Army of the Dead is on the march and our Kardasian Kultur is trying to get its head around Kim Jong Un.  Obama NSA Chief Susan Rice says, “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,”  I mean, Dennis Rodman likes him and Seth Rogan made a movie about how funny he is - what's Trump's problem? Leave him alone.

Back to our fictional world of Westeros and one its more interesting characters - Varys.

Varys, AKA The Spider, is a former slave, eunuch and sorcerer's apprentice who ammassed political power and position by becoming a One Man Drudge Report - Varys gets the News before it is fit to print and acts accordingly.  He is the ultimate City Hall insider of any City he happens to glide through.  With venom and honey, Varys proves that knowledge is power, until knowledge shifts.  Enemies like Little Finger and the goatish old Grand Maester Pycelle.

Varys, like so many Mandarins at City Hall, the County Buildin, or the White House, uses information to remain viable, necessary and alive.   Most people find these deep state types - off-putting. Truth becomes an expendable expedient with them and they come up with convenient 'truths' like Chicago Values.

Varys reveals himself to be a very good hearted Mandrin.  Varys wants peace, justice and order and will create chaos to bring this about, all the while doing what he can to protect the brilliant and ethical dwarf Tyrion Lannister, as well as dim Samsa Stark.

Sexually ambiguous, Varys has flocks of "little birds'  orphans and street urchins who are his information highway and to whom he owes much of his power.

Most of the people of Kings' Landing assume he satisfies his desires with his "little birds" but this seems unlikely as Varys has never shown any malice or desire towards his spies, and he has himself stated that he would never seek to harm a child. Varys admits that, after his castration, he did sell himself sexually for a while in his struggle to survive the slums of Essos. However, he took no enjoyment from it- and, after witnessing so much cruelty take place in Westeros and Essos as a result of desire, he claims to be relieved that he can no longer experience it.

That is a core quality.  Core qualities, like core truths are anathema to the current secular PC morality, driven by class envy, race hate, gender victimization and academic fraudulence.   Core truth is was brings human being together and ultimately to God.

At the turn of the 2nd Century AD,  there lived a Roman slave by the name of Callistus.  He was brilliant and his master put him charge of a bank.   Like the Gospel of Matthew ( 25:14-30), Callistus invested 'creatively' seeking to increase his master's wealth and that of bank clients.  Unlike the gospel message, things did not pan-out for Callistus.

The bank went bust and Callistus tried to make things good by getting the people he made bad loans to pay up, he incited a riot at a synagogue was sentenced to the mines - Sixteen tons and deeper in debt.

With bribes and broken promises Callistus weasled his way out of the mines and found work tending the Christian cemetaries for Pope Zephyrinus, not the brightest Pontiff in the drawer.  Soon Callistus became an Archdeacon and Bishop, much to anger of right-living ecclesiastical pharisses like the historian Tertullian and anti-Pope Hippolytus, both contempraries hated his guts and wrote his obituaries:

During the subsequent reign of Pope Zephyrinus, Callistus became a deacon and the caretaker of a major Roman Christian cemetery (which still bears his name as the “Cemetery of St. Callistus”), in addition to advising the Pope on theological controversies of the day. He was a natural candidate to follow Zephyrinus, when the latter died in 219.
Hippolytus, an erudite Roman theologian, accused Pope Callistus of sympathizing with heretics, and resented the new Pope's clarification that even the most serious sins could be absolved after sincere confession. The Pope's assertion of divine mercy also scandalized the North African Christian polemicist Tertullian, already in schism from the Church in Carthage, who also erroneously held that certain sins were too serious to be forgiven through confession.
Considered in light of this error, Hippolytus' catalogue of sins allegedly “permitted” by Callistus – including extramarital sex and early forms of contraception - may in fact represent offenses which the Pope never allowed, but which he was willing to absolve in the case of penitents seeking reconciliation with the Church.
Even so, Callistus could not persuade Hippolytus' followers of his rightful authority as Pope during his own lifetime. The Catholic Church, however, has always acknowledged the orthodoxy and holiness of Pope St. Callistus I, particularly since the time of his martyrdom – traditionally ascribed to an anti-Christian mob - in 222. 

Callistus was a generous soul who forgave human frailty, but was resolved to bring all Christians together.

Like Varys, Callistus was sneered at and slighted by his less talented rivals.  Both men were born slaves, suffered many indignities, served cruel masters and retained their core virtues and lived for others.

Game of Thrones is a fine Cliffs Notes aid to learning how to get back to God,  Winter is  Coming.

 

Game of Thrones is Theology

Two of my favorite characters from Game of Thrones - Arya and The Hound

I love the HBO series Game of Thrones. This fantasy medieval Continent of Westeros is peopled by folks like us.  Like our world and its history, Westeros is place where vice, betrayal, incest, sodomy, devil worship, megalomania and brute force appears to clear the way for a seat on the Iron Throne.

That is the basic appeal, for me anyway.  The worst of us always seem to avoid cancer, heartbreak, neglect, disappointment, favor and position.  The best around us seem to die too young, bear burdens unimaginable, pay the checks and receive scorn for their best efforts.  Just like life in Westeros.

The Captain of the State Championship Football team diddles his sister, murders the kid next door and is appointed by the Ward Committeeman to stand for the Cook County Board.

Just like here.  There are a few good people in public office, (name two) but there are more dummies, grifters, power junkies and cowards smiling over the crowd of hapless helots passing out their palm cards at the polling places every election.

If all of this seems rather depressing to you, it should not.

Life is not Sesame Street, it is more like Westeros, whether we live in Cook County, Pyongyang, or Kenebunkport.

Oprah, the Frugal Gourmet, Phil Donahue, NPR, Bill Moyers Barack Obama and The View numbed us for decades that we should all worship ourselves.

Game of Thrones, like Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, the Wire and other cable dramas appear to have snapped us out of our stupor.

We are not all that important. The world is a Vale of Tears, get over yourself.

We are all redeemable - St. Augustine, Mary Magdalene, Ignatius Loyola, St. Olga of Kiev, Mary of Eygpt, St. Dismas and St. Callsitus, the Whitey Bulger of Rome all managed to turn things around before their obituaries were written.

We are all lovable to other people - even Donald Trump, even Cercei Lannister.

The great Chicago writer John Kass is a huge fan of Game of Thrones.  He recently challenged me to give some examples of " stone cold killers " and crooks who salvaged their souls, like the delightfully thuggish Hound - a knight without pity, but great sense of irony.

This beast serving cruel masters has made an ocean of blood from his victims, some of whom offered him a place on a cold night and the last of their food.  The Hound breakfasted by slaughtering the widower and his daughter. " They would not survive the winter," is his summation to the little girl the brute has saved from his cruel masters.

The little girl is a fierce Arya Stark,, who now appears to be more dangerous than Hound ever dreamed he could be.

John Kass is worried that this girl is now too far gone.

Nope.  Game of Thrones and the above mentioned dramas are at core theology lessons.  Theology draws us back to God, once we have re-hab-ed our way out of the delusion that we are god.  To quote Oprah, “The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” ― Oprah Winfrey

Worked for the delusional Walt Whitman as well.  Celebrate yourself!  Then what?

God gave us everything.  What do we do with health, finance, family, home, friendships, or integrity?  Do we cave in to "what the heart wants?"  Yep.  More often than not, we do.  Our faith, if we were ever rooted in one, might get us to snap out the need to celebrate ourselves - to be the very bestest me there is - and actually lend a hand to the work around us.

Some of us might become Whitey Bulger, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Some few of us might even become a Cardinal George, or a Gertrude Weil.

Most of us live in Flea Bottom, join the Lannister Army, or as Wildings. Some of us advance like the Onion Knight, Ser Davos Seaworth, the perfect model of working man, or the Bastard Jon Snow and find ouselves confronting our worst nightmares as well as pure human villainy.

The bad guys might win, the crumbs might have more in their checking account balances, but soldiering on and taking stock of lives and wondering if there is a right side to history, or whether God's plan includes your future comfort and good fortune are the very things that unite us. We are not 'special, entitled, or vital to life's path.'  We are here and that is good enough.

It took our culture decades to erase God.  It takes time to realize that fact and that God is not going anywhere.

Game of Thrones is not for children.  Game of Thrones is a theology test.

The Hound, Jamie Lannister, Arya Stark and even Little Finger can be redeemed.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about St. Callistus, a slave, an embezzler, a gang-leader, a cut-throat and back-slider who became Pope and a Martyr.

Go to church on Sunday and watch Game of Thrones.