To Carry that Sad Torch

I will always think about you, even if I live without you -song by Ronnie Rice and Leslie Kummel

Well that's how it goes and Joe, I know your gettin' pretty anxious to close
So, thanks for the cheer, I hope you didn't mind my bendin' your ear
This torch that I found must be drowned or it soon might explode
So, make it one for my baby and one more for the road
That long, long road - lyrics by Johnny Mercer

"Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" - William Shakespeare -Romeo & Juliet

How many of us have carried a torch for a love?  All of us?  Unrequited?  Requited, but unsatisfying?

How about the kind of passionate infatuation that knocks us completely out of selves?

I was driving home from a wonderful date with with wonderful woman, while listening to heart wrenching phrasing and meticulous intonation of every syllable by the Swedish jazz genius Monica Zetterlund with  Jimmy Jones-p, Al Hall-trp, Milt Hinton-b, Bobby Donaldson-d.

Try this -


My God! I thought of my wife who went home to Christ in 1998 and how we met.  We in love think of having forever. Yeah, right.

I am blessed to know love again. Some people never have that.

Let's think about that and many people who never recovered from God's greatest gift to us - the unqualified love of another person.

Here's a few, real and imagined,  who carried that sad torch:

Don Quixote and Dulcinea
Katherine Hepburn for Spencer Tracy
Oscar Wilde for Lord Alfred Douglas
Dwight Eisenhower for Kay Summersby
Mark Antony for Cleopatra
Heloise and Abelard
Marilyn Monroe and my gender
King Arthur and Guenevere
Errol Flynn for Olivia de Havilland
Frank Sinatra for Eva Gardner

Love and lose. With God's grace alone we might win again.  Loneliness is a killer.

It makes some so unstable that they become stalkers.  It can paralyze an athlete and stultify a happy genius.


May sad songs be our limit.

Woke White Folks? Woke? Really, Jonathan. Take a Walk Up Maplewood Avenue.

The Chicago Tribune picks up the bulk of its coverage from the Washington Post, other papers, the Associated Press and approved lick-spittles.

Today Jonathan Capehart, a real beauty and a signal dandy of reason that the American people detest the mainstream media, offers an insultingly inaccurate hate-piece on white working class Americans: All working people, to be accurate.

The guys who fix the Peoples Gas lines all over Morgan Park, Mount Greenwood, Archer Heights and Ashburn these days are for the most part working class white guys.  I walked up Maplewood Avenue to St. John Fisher for services at 6:12 A.M. yesterday.  I usually take Talman, but changed my route, just for giggles.

At that time half a score of People Gas utility vehicles, accompanied by allied contractors vehicles: back-hoes, bobcats and cement finisher rigs with lumber and tools were lining the both sides of Maplewood Avenue.  By the way,  white working class kids learn the difference between a street and an avenue in pre-school.  A street has houses on both sides and and avenue runs perpendicular (right next to) a street and has trees on both sides.  Well, the vehicles mentioned were populated with working men - black, Latino and mostly white guys.  They were in the majority, numerically speaking.

However, according to Jonathan Capehart, a poster child for W.E.B. DuBois's 'Talented Ten Per Cent, who was immediately made an editorial board member when he began work at the New York Daily News and was married to his boyfriend by the Attorney General of United States, Eric 'Nation of Cowards' Holder and covered for another Attorney General after she met with Bill Clinton just prior to James Comey's absolution of Candidate Hilary Clinton.  Jonathan Capehart is on every cable news show and is a major player, Mosel Tov.

Jonathan Capehart did the black bag work on Bernie Sanders.  You could say, that Jonathan Capehart launched the Trump White House. Oh, I will.  Jonathan Capehart gelded Bernie Sanders and propelled Donald J. Trump into the White House.

Now, Capehart is free to blame anyone for the Trump Presidency, but as a gold-plated black man and as an LGBTQ 4th Estate bullet proof voice, blame white working class people and their supposed fear of blacks, gays, Muslims, Caitlyn Jenner, Elizabeth Warren, BitCoins, science and rainbows for the current rise in global respect, calmer waters in the South China Sea, a sky-high Dow Jones and the Resistance.

Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism." That was the you-don't-say headline on an April 17 Monkey Cage analysis by Thomas Wood of the 2016 American National Election Study. It was just more statistical confirmation of what we already know. You may recall a column last September about other studies of the electorate by The Washington Post's Dana Milbank with the headline "Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist."
We all kinda know what's going on here. (And by "we all," I'm speaking generally about people of color, African Americans in particular, and woke whites — "the new American majority," . . .

WOKE White Folks*?  Is that not from the coinage of Maxine Waters? Guess not.  We all?

 . . .as author Steve Phillips puts it.) It's fear, anger and economic insecurity mixed with anxiety over the browning of America and the subsequent loss of preferred status that this will naturally entail. A new book by Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, takes that gut feeling reinforced by an overflow of anecdotal evidence and grounds it in research.

Really?  Like that scientific fact that gays comprise astronomically significant random samplings of the American populace?

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.  Gallup

and that Brown is the new White?  

Trump won the white working class vote, because guys like Jonathan Capehart undid the Progressive base by going all Maxine Waters on Bernie Sanders.  That and white working class people, as well as black working class people, and brown working class people like to have their bank accounts reflect their efforts.

But, Steve Phillips, one of the archtects of the 2016 strategy argues:

The first step the next chair (DNC) should take to fix this problem is to conduct a transparent and brutally honest assessment of exactly what happened in 2016. There are a lot of misunderstandings, incorrect conclusions, and false and facile assumptions floating around and influencing preliminary plans for progressives in the future. One such myth, for example, is that millions of voters abandoned Democrats and flocked to the Trump campaign, when in fact Clinton got just about the same number of votes that Obama did in 2012 (Trump exceeded Romney’s 2012 numbers by 2 million votes, and third-party candidates received 5 million more votes than they did in 2016). Understanding exactly what happened and why is an essential first step to winning back the White House.

Brown might be the dominant demographic in the coming years, but stupid is color blind.

The progressive message stinks, Steve. It stinks in technicolor!  The WOKE whites at the Nation, Salon, The New Republic, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, NBC, CNN and Al Jazera  continue with same idiotic, diffisive and race baiting messages spouted by WOKE whites like Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Michigan Fats Moore and Chris Matthews.

Working people fear nothing, Jonathan.  They go to work, go to war, go to the polls, go to church, go to their children's events and go to the aid of their neighbors.

The guys fixing the gas lines under the sidwalks all long Maplewood Avenue were all laughing with one another, running for coffee at Dunkin Donuts over on Western Ave. for their crews and showing absolutely no signs of Trump terror and nor did they make nosie as their neighbors slept, before they too went to work.


* WOKE Whites  do not work back-hoes, Bobcats, nor do they labor with working men and women of color:

The latest revolution of “woke” doesn’t roll its eyes at white people who care about racial injustice, but it does narrow them at those who seem overeager to identify with the emblems and vernacular of the struggle. For black activists, there is a certain practicality in publicly naming white allies. Being woke, Stovall says, means being “aware of the real issues” and willing to speak of them “in ways that are uncomfortable for other white folks.” But identifying allies poses risks, too. “There are times when people have been given the ‘black pass,’ and it hasn’t worked out so well,” Stovall says. “Like Clinton in the ’90s.” A white person who gains a kind of license to use power on behalf of black people can easily wield that power on behalf of themselves.

Uh,huh.

My Writing Exercise: A Heavy Mule at the Pierian Spring

Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Critics next, and prov'd plain Fools at last.
Some neither can for Wits nor Critics pass,
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.

I was told by my teaching mentor, " If you plan to teach writing, you had better write for at least two hours before you come to teach."  That meant getting up well before "It's time to get up."

It also meant that I needed to steal myself to a habit of engaging my craft.  Aristotle wrote, " We are what we repeatedly do,"  The famously taciturn President Calvin Coolidge said, "  Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

A grammar school coach, Tom Spatz said, " Losers have potential."  He also, asked me if I had polio a few years earlier, when he saw me dribble a basketball.

I still dribble a basketball like an exceptionally challenged human being. All Up in here!

However, since signing my contract at Bishop Martin D. McNamara High School in May of 1975, I have written for two hours before I went to teach my students.

This habit did not make me a great writer, but it did help me become something of an effective teacher.

Reading, speaking and writing forces one to engage other human beings.  Reading introduces thoughts, deeds and manners of expression far beyond our immediate social circle.  Speaking helps us say what we mean.  Writing requires exactness.

I write whatever comes to mind and that is a mixed bag to be sure.  What I hope will happen by end of my scribbling and correcting and modifying will be short, satisfying defense of all the things have made my life fun, fruitful and favorable to someone who reads what I have written.

Lessons learned from good people, who have provided for other people as tradesmen, butchers, milkmen, nurses, police officers, firemen, coaches and teachers mean as much and often more than picked up from pages from Balzac, Turgenev, Gorky, Joyce, Tacitus, or Swift. The harmonies of sounds pulled from the din of a loud basement full of relatives and family friends at a Christmas Party among picnic tables lifted from the forest preserves covered in table cloth and loaded with potato salads, cold cuts, pots of Italian beef, corned beef, Kapusta, Mostaccioli, cakes and soad bread; with blaring accordions, fiddles, tin whistles played by Cuz Teahan, Jimmy Neary, Tom Masterson and Kate Neary, or a powerful HiFi loaded with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Prima and John Coltrane.  Cousin doing Irish step-dancing, or Sugar push and out back steps to Gene Krupa.  Then of course just free-form, white guy moves to This Old Heart of Mine by the Four Tops.

An uncle pulls you aside and tells you to knock off whatever the hell it is that you think you are doing.

Your aunt tells him to go and have another beer and mind his own business and to turn the car keys over - Now. 

Scores of kids scream with delight, or terror.  Several cry because they being picked on and comforted until they can go and pick on someone for themselves and all is good.

Words impact from everywhere.

The meanings of those words will be lost on the world, unless someone remembers what the hell was said.  Memory can often be very convenient.

Memory is the burden carried by one who writes and that burden only gets eased with writing down the words.

Sometimes words seem like leftovers from a party.

Weighty Issue by Michael Sneed: TextAlyzer Soon! Sneedless to Say! Aldermen Burke & Beale Licensed to Steal!

The way to access the halls of power is on one's belly.

Groveling before an elected, or appointed room temperature I.Q. with a nasty streak aiding and abetting a larcenous soul is the Chicago School Journalism.

No one crawls on her belly like a reptile better than Chicago Sun Times gossip, prattle, dirt, low-down, bilge and bullshit doyen Michael Sneed.

Steinberg, Brown, Spielman and Sweet are close to the nectarous nest, but they wriggle without real gusto.

Ink-slingers in this hick-burg, with the exceptions of Natalie Korecki, Tim Novak and estimable John Kass, eschew shoe leather for the blower to gain access from the narrow-foreheads at the County Building and City Hall.

So adept are these serpentine scribes, that in no times at all they, or their spouses, children, significant others find work with BGA, get a sinecure at De Paul, land a spot on the staffs of the Speaker, the Guv, the Mayor, the Leader, or the foundations that funnel the filthy lucre to the direct action social justice warriors.





Ethics?  Spell it.



Andy Shaw, who could not find the microphone into which he was shouting at the Democratic Convention, when John Kerry sailed into Boston Harbor like the British Fleet and big-knocker-ed socialites wore bright pink " I Had an Abortion" T-Shirts, is now the Watchdog of the People Killing Illinois.

But Michael Sneed remains the Queen of the Nest!

Today, she offers more propaganda than a Pfleger homily at St. Sabina Faith Community with Archbishop Cupich in the big chair.

Today, we are being signaled, given a heads-up, donchanew of the latest  government grift.

The TextAlyzer.  Think Skyway; think Red Light Camera's, think 20MPH less than 1,000 yards from the posted 30 MPH limit.

Quoth Sneed:

It’s no secret texting and using a handheld mobile device while driving is toxic, illegal and frequently deadly.
But brake on this mobile shocker!

• To wit: According to Chicago Police Department statistics obtained by Sneed, there were only 168 Chicago traffic citations for the improper use of mobile devices in 2016 — compared with 45,672 two years earlier in 2014!
So what gives?

Pause for a breath -

 YOU DO!

Sneed slithered sources swiftly!

“It seems hard to believe, but when we received these shocking statistics we were stunned,” said Ald. Edward Burke (14th), who said Chicago traffic citations and violations in 2015 had already started dropping dramatically to 26,092!
“But the dramatic dip not only went down to 168 in 2016 — but as of April 2017, only 74 have been issued!
“Something happened,” Burke said.

“We are still looking into the reason for these statistics,” a Chicago Law Department source told Sneed.

“So now we are trying to find out why the issuance of tickets for the offenses has dropped so precipitously,” Burke added.
“Whatever the reason, be assured we will correct it one way or another.”
• A national note: “It’s distressing to see what’s happening across the country,” he said. “The stats show the most frequent cause of serious traffic accidents is the use of mobile phones and texting devices while driving — so we need to revitalize the effort led four years ago by Secretary of State Jesse White to enforce these traffic laws.”

• Backshot: Burke claims he and Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) came across the shocking stats while “investigating the possibility of requiring the police to use a Textalyzer device that could determine whether a driver involved in an accident was on the phone at the time of the crash.

The buck shot?  What buck?