You Must Punch a Bully, But It Is Stupid to Move-into His House -Policy Lessons from George Smith

A wonderful black man who worked security at Orchestra Hall in the late 1960's and early 1970's,  where I worked as a janitor ( Local 25), told me, " You can not change people.  You can punch a punk in the mouth and then you had better put some shoe tips in his ribs and kidneys, until he understands your point of view and then be sure to repeat the process every time he waves at you from across the street -"Hi, George!'  Oh, yeah 'Hi, Mother@#$%er!' punch kick and slap. He'll behave.  Mmmmhmmm.  But you can not change people."

George Smith was a philosopher-king*.

His words have stayed with me.  Do not be a man violence, unless you make your point very, very clear.

The important lesson is that people will never change.  They will modify their behavior, avoid punishment, seek calmer waters, but never change.

Assad, Putin, Kim Jong Un and every Jihadist waving a Kalashnikov and shooting a woman in back of the head, or driving a beer truck into a Swedish Nordstroms will never change.

Moving into the house with a louse to make him change his evil ways is as stupid as . . .sending American soldiers into Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, or over the 38th Parallel.

President Trump ordered a spirited response to the chinless Monster of Syria's gassing of his neighbors.

He painted no "RED LINE" with Obama's Super Invisible Ink.

President Trump went all George Smith on Syria.  Putin got the message and so did the thugs around the North Korean Fat boy. They understand what 'incoming rounds' mean.  Do they ever! After all, Kim Jong Un has used NKPA generals and his own kin for 80 mm mortar practice.

America has the best military hardware and hard-men.  American warriors know how to apply shoe tips to ribs and kidneys. They get it, kick the crumbs to the curb, stomp if necessary and come home. Mission Accomplished!  Without sending more and more American kids into harm's way.

Had GW Bush some sand in his craw, each and every person involved in 9/11 would have ( and most certainly could have) had a 9mm shot through the noggin.  End of story. But greedy pigs wanted regime change and new markets in Fallujah.

I believe that regime change will take place and without the help of Senators Graham and McCain - the the Aunt Cyp and Uncle Sap of Endless Wars,

President Trump needs to listen to the very good people that helped him win the White House.

Assad is a world wide pain in the ass. Putin knows it. A couple of more Tomahawks in the right places and Vlad the Bad will send the lads of Spetsnaz calling on the lanky gump, Bashir Assad, for  his Global Valediction.  Likewise, the guys with the over sized garrison caps around Kim Jong Un will take tubby out to the artillery range for some close-up and exciting pyrotechnics.


George Smith understood foreign and domestic policy - take care of a punk on the street and come home to a happy house.


* George  once made the CEO of a major Chicago company grab some floor, when the oligarch used his key to the Cliff Dwellers long after hours.  " What's a burglar want with the Cliff Dwellers at this late hour?"

I will not say which concern, nor who accompanied the figure reported frequently in Kup's Column, out of respect for the man's family.  One never knows, do one?

Peace, Music, Genocide and Samantha Power

The Power behind Policy - Samantha Power

Last night I attended a concert at Orchestra Hall ( Symphony Center, but it will always be Old Ted Thomas' Orchestra Hall to me) developed and conducted by Francis Cardinal George and Sir Gilbert Levine. Cardinal George was the Executive Producer of this concert and had brought together people of many faiths, talents and points of view.

Leading the Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Chorus in a special concert celebrating the first anniversary of the beatification of John Paul II. "Peace Through Music: In the Spirit of John Paul – Chicago 2012" Sir Gilbert Levine helped bring people of all faiths and political points of view together through music.

This event coincided with the visit to our fair city by the Nobel Peace Laureates and Sean Penn.  The concert's genesis was the seventeen year partnership and intense friendship between a young musician and the Pope who brought down Communism.  One of the Nobel Laureates was Lech Walesa who along with the Polish Pontiff defied the balkanizing and soulless dictates of secular materialism through their faith, courage and commitment to something greater than themselves. It would be pretty tough to be a self-absorbed celebrity on the docks of Gdansk.

Music is essentially math.  What we consider mathematics in our post-spiritual material world is bean-counting, whether it measures glaciers, or counts the bodies of slaughtered innocents.  Music is God's math in truth. Music sweeps our souls clean. It is the primal  antiseptic and narcotic. 

In celebration of the Beatification of Pope John Paul II, music brought people together.  Jews and Catholics, secularists and people of faith.  The first half of the concert featured a 1,000 year old Polish hymn to the Mother of God, a modernist choral and orchestral piece, and Bach's Magnificat in D Minor.  J.S. Bach was a Lutheran whose devotional  sense of music shunned not the Faith from which he and his family parted company.  The second half of the evening's performances was devoted to Ludwig Von Beethoven's Symphony # 3 - The Eroica. Eroica means "Heroic."  Hero comes from Old English or Anglo Saxon - ἥρϝως meaning protector, or defender.

Beethoven originally dedicated Symphony # 3 - to Napoleon, until the Little Corporal crowned himself Emperor.  Instead, the deaf man of Bonn praised the human spirit without borders. Sir Gilbert Levine swept notes, talents, personalities, assumptions, backgrounds and beliefs into a tornado of spirit in the Fourth Movement.  I have listened to The Eroica many times and at the command of the batons of Sir George Solti, James Levine, Henry Mazer, Carlo Maria Guillini and Andre Previn. I have heard it live as a a teenage punk janitor laying on the stairs, or the red plush boxes of Orchestra Hall while the CSO rehearsed or performed.  May Malibu CD player has churned out Beethoven's Third.  I did not really get it until last night with the 4th and final movement - Beethoven is all over the place guided by a bass-line.

The bass-line, it seems to me anyway, is the recognition of  the human constants - the sanctity of human life, the courage required to move here and there and at subtle but necessary changes of pace and tone in order to be truly heroic - to protect life, liberty and human happiness.  Music is math.

The human spirit tires.  Pope John Paul II seemed to instinctively know that we all need to become souls refreshed - he too suffered under the worst that the human spirit allows when it gets too tired of counting costs and bodies - nationalistic fascism and international Communism.  Through music, Pope John Paul seemed to say "It is easy to go along when you are tired; snap out of it and get back in the game!"

I got home at 11:45 P.M. last night and woke up at 4: A.M. most refreshed.  I don't remember what I dreamed about, but it must have been good.  I read.

I read about President Obama's visit to the Holocaust Museum yesterday and his announcement of  the U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board to be headed by National Security Adviser Samantha Power.

Nobel intentions and goals.    Ms. Power was a force behind President Obama's outreach to the Muslilim World, his promises to Hamas, his dismissal of Amercan Exceptionalism and his policies against Israel.
 Ms. Power's board is yet to be named.  That will bear some attention, I believe. Samantha Power was  ayoung reporter who covered the War in the Balkans and wrote a best seller about America's failure to act while Croatians, Serbs, Christians and Muslims engaged in ethnic cleansing,  She was most affected by the slaughter of Muslims there.

Ms. Power has taken a view of Israel besieged that makes sense to Oscar nominees, but is lost on most people.  Ms. Power even advocated a US invasion of Israel to prevent another Holocaust. No, really.



Genocide is about as unheroic as human beings can get.  Islam has been pretty clear on its intentions with regard to Israel from the Grand Mufti to the leadership of Hamas.

Dafur, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Soviet history and the Third Reich are warnings of the failure to refresh the human spirit - the bass-line was ignored.   The bass-line theme of The Eroica.  Pope John Paul II understood the power of music.  Ms. Power knows accounting.  I do not believe that President Obama understands music, much less accounting.

Thoughts of Glenna and the War of Roses and my Toeses

When I went to Loyola back in the early 1970's, I took a class with Dr. Trimble - English History: The Wars of the Roses To The Tudors. Only five students took the class and by the second week it was down to me and a girl named Glenna, most days as the other three students made only perfunctory appearances.

Dr. Lionel Trimble was a scholar*of the old school. He was close to seventy years old and spoke in very mannered, low and formal English, but what he spoke of -Perkin Warbeck, Nat Tyler, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Mortimer, Richard II,III, Pope Nicholas Breakspear, York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of Gloucester, Buckingham, Owen Glendower, and Henry Tudor honeyed the air of Loyola's Lewis Tower on Rush Street, or so I believed.

Dr. Trimble began lecturing the moment he closed the door at the appointed time - if you were late you were locked out. History after all is about time.

Glenna was from the far North - Kennilworth or Winnetka and dressed like she was going to a board meeting at Northern Trust Bank. This was in the days when blue jeans were uniform of the day for Catholic girls freed from jumpers of Longwood Academy, Queen of Peace, Maria, St. Scholastica and other convents-lite.

Glenna had jet-black hair and alabaster skin and wore pearls most days and horn-rimmed black glasses. More importantly, to this late-adolescent testosterone bubbling scholar-manque, Glenna was graced by God with the body of mortal sin itself.
Her calves and legs, usually encased in grey or blue hose, were magnificently athletic and femininely arched at the feet, shod in low heeled pumps or black boots.

Glenna was a twenty year old Mary Tyler Moore encorpified. It took every level of self-control and self-worth in my poor powers to focus on the Wars of the Roses, when the war of hormones and romantic day-dreaming of a life as the kept man of Glenna: she attending to the world of corporate banking and larding our savings and checking accounts and me ministering to her every passion, while cooking and cleaning our Tudor Brick Home adorned by Red and White Rose bushes and maintaining my wash-board like belly, and rock hard chest with feats of home-spun athleticism.

To say that I was distracted is understatement.

Glenna and I communicated but once as I recall - days before the end of the Spring Semester. I was seated in my usual position of advantage angled just behind and to the right of this exquisite beauty, in order to take in every move and crossing of legs, but most importantly the neck, ears and superior jaw occasionally draped by the raven hair - flicked with an elegant racking by manicured and lovely fingers.

As was my wont - I was adorned in my janitor's uniform grey green work slacks and light grey long sleeved shirt with patches over each pectoral -left emblazoned HICKEY and right in Gothic script ORCHESTRA HALL. I wore heavy work boots and thick white socks. I would go from my classes directly to 220 S. Michigan and work the 3-11 shift, get relieved by cousin Willie and Tony Gac, study and sleep. Get up take a shower in the musicians locker room and return to class. Ah, the Days of Ivy!

My legs stretched comfortably in anticipation of Dr. Trimble's arrival and luxuriating in the breath-takingly sexy propriety that was Glenna and I checked my notes.

Glenna forced down her Oxford University text and pulled her horn-rimmed glasses off, tossed her cascade of black hair in a sweep that scarfed her neck and stared into my eyes with her own lavender blue orbs - "Excuse me."

My heart stopped. Yes?

"Please move, or do something. Your feet smell awful. Really. I am sorry. Please; before I throw up."

Slack jawed and silently I skulked back several seats and rows away. Dr. Trinble saved me from further shame by transporting me to Bosworth Fields.

I got and A + for my essay, notes and exams; never saw Glenna again.

By the way, my feet had soured due to the fact that I wore the same work shoes day-in-day out in rain, snow, and slush. My doctor gave me a formaldehyde regimen. Rule -toss boondockers and tennis shoes; merely washing feet don't do it.

My feet are like Roses, ever since Glenna.


*

Powicke, F.M. (1953). The Oxford History of England: The Thirteenth Century 1216-1307. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198217080.

Green, V.H.H. (1955). The Later Plantagenets: A Survey of English History Between 1307-1485. Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. ISBN 0713151765.

Friday Night Noise -Chicago Symphony Orchestra -Under Georg Solti!

I worked ( well, mostly. . . sometimes . . .when they could find me) at Orchestra Hall from 1969-1974 - on and off.

Victor Aitay CSO Violinist and Solti Concertmaster and all around good guy used to say that Solti was nuts in rehearsals and calm in performance. Bud Herseth, Frank Miller, Don Peck, Gordon Peters, Don Koss, Mary Sauer, Dale Clevenger and my old buddy Phil Scharff were my favorite musicians with CSO.

That Magyar was a Beaut!

Sears Tower Glass Bottom Deck? Not Gonna Happen! I'm Satisfied Down Here On the Ground -Tell The Truth on 'Em Lou Rawls!

Click My Post Title for the Great Lou Rawls at the Hollywood Palace - 'I'm Satisfied'& 'Down Here on the Ground' - Get the whole Truth from Lou.

Sears Tower, or the Buddy Hackett Pavilion, or the Buck-Up-And-You-Name-It Obelisk, is putting in some kind of a see through plexi-glass Test Your Nuts for Money Gizmo.

Pass. The last time this Daisy went up over eight(8) stories over the concrete was in 1969 when janitor superintendent Art Fry sent my seventeen year old ass up the unprotected ( flat,rusted iron ladder with nothing behind) fire escape -last resort access - on the front of Orchestra Hall ( Now Symphony Center) at 220 South Michigan to pull wet bunting off the front of the building when the elevator system broke-down, to clear off the debris after the ticker tape parade for the Apollo 11 Crew on Michigan Ave. It rained like a cow peeing on a flat rock after that parade and every bit of paper in Chicago seemed to stick to the front of Orchestra Hall -'Get Your skinny Mick Ass Up There! It'll only hurt once.'

I cried and blubbered like Kanye West in a good mood the entire time - got it done though.

Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins I am not!

I was, and continue to be, as Yellow as a Duck's Foot!