Old Commies Live a Long Time - For Longevity, Go Red!

  Nah.  You'd have been fine Pete. Catholics, Jews, genuine labor leaders, working stiffs of every race and color  . . .not so lucky. 



Pete Seeger the privileged WASP New York kid who pretended to come from Appalachia died this week at age 94. Wasn't That a Time?

It is amazing that old Reds and vigorous fellow travellers, now called Progressives,  manage to cheat the Grim Reaper. Chicago has always been a labor town, but the Reds never succeeded in making Chicago their own, until the last forty years or so. Labor kicked out the Reds under John L. Lewis and subsequent labor leaders, until Democrats discovered that Reds help increase the voting rolls - hat tip to Jane Byrne.

Lookee H'yar!  With possible exceptions of the youthful demise of  Saul Alinsky (63 yrs,)and Roger Baldwin (70), Red and Pinkish Lefties tend to reap at least eight score years.

Famous Dead Reds and Past Pinks
Leon Despres (dec,) -99
Pete Seeger(dec,) - 94
Studs Terkel (dec.)- 95
Dawn Clark Netsch(dec.) -86
Frank Marshall Davis (dec.)-82
Clarence Darrow (dec.)- 80

Living the Over Throw of Capitalism
Dr. Quentin Young - 91 and still plotting

When the Reds say "Long Live . . .whatever!"  they really mean it.

Must be eating all those beets.

Joseph Epstein and Some Literary Lives Not Worth the Trouble

I was working as a janitor at Orchestra Hall, while I attended Loyola University in Chicago between 1970-1974. They were the Solti years. I soaked in the greatest and most soul stirring music by the most disciplined and finest craftsmen in the musical arts.

Whenever the symphony rehearsed or performed the maintenance staff was like the crew of submarine being pinged by an enemy destroyer. Silent running. No vacuums; no noise; no grab-assing! Though we were all union members of Elevator Operators, Janitors, Electricians, Painters, Stage Hands and Stationary Engineers unions, violating the silence could get one tossed from the job.

During those times and many others I studied.

Like the music I soaked in Ruskin, Chaucer, Bacon, Wordsworth, Bellow, Bashevis Singer, O'Connor, Tolstoy and Turgenev. The professors at Loyola, Jesuit and Lay shaped the study to good effect. One of the more difficult authors in the entire canon of English studies, for me anyway was Thomas Carlyle and of his works Sartor Resartus the most difficult.

The work originally was a series of offerings found in Fraser's Magazine that purported to be philosophical commentaries on the life and works of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh whose development of the philosophy of clothes was to have been a very big deal. It wasn't and that was the joke. Carlyle being a lowland Scot was about as funny as a Quaker on Valium.

What I took away from the work was the very real understanding that literary artists could be absolute drips, crabs, bigots, bores and humbugs. I would wish to spend time with the living breathing Thomas Carlyle as I would with Studs Terkel. Both gents are asleep with Kings and Counsellors and in a very good place - for all of us.

I love to read and I like to read people who remind me of my better professors - the men and women who soaked themselves in their disciplines. While I was a high school teacher, I worked to be a better teacher by reading and subscribing to the better literary journals. One of the best was American Scholar edited by America's Montaigne -Joseph Epstein. it was in the pages of American Scholar where I discovered Gary Saul Morson who defended literary criticism fro the waves of fashionable idiots like Noam Chomsky. Morson, like Epstein taught at Northwestern, is a brilliant Tolstoy scholar. I am a Thackeray geek; Tolstoy was as well; therefore the connection of interest.

Morson and Editor essayist Epstein are fierce defenders of the humanities and the unifying purpose of art and politics. They confound the Marxists and Semiotic Totalitarians who have dominated literary discourse and academic studies for far too long.

The American Scholar is no more, but Joseph Epstein whirls his pen dervishly in defence of the literary arts.

Joseph Epstein is the "Retailor of the tailors" to use Carlyle's translation for his dense satire. I subscribe to the purportedly Jewish magazine Commentary, as much because Joseph Epstein proses there regularly as anything else.

Last month, Epstein took a look at the literary critic Alfred Kazin, whom, like Noam Chomsky - the Rodney Dangerfield of the Humorless, everyone worships, but no one reads. Here is a Fun Size bite of Joseph Epstein:

The writers Kazin most strongly admired were William Blake​ and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Simone Weil and Jean-Paul Sartre, advocates of life intensely lived but with an emphatically preacherly vein added. Kazin resembled them all in never being in doubt about his own superior rectitude. He thought himself an American Orwell, his heart always in the right place and keen to take up a position in what used to be known as “the third camp,” scorning, that is, Communists and anti-Communists alike. “I have never recovered from the thirties or wanted to,” he wrote in Writing Was Everything. “A son of the immigrant working class whose parents were tortured by poverty, I hardly needed the depression to be suspicious of moneyed power, or to see that in this society money is the first measure of all things and the only measure of many—or to learn for myself that there is no way in America of being honorably poor.”

Kazin preferred to think himself a writer rather than a critic. But in his noncritical writing, without a book or author to intervene between him and the reader, his personality comes through and putrefies everything with his self-righteous sourness. Like Emerson and Thoreau, he was a blatantly self-approving writer, and the strong element of confidence about his own virtue spoils much of what he wrote apart from his criticism, including his autobiographies.

The first of these, A Walker in the City, which in his Journals he refers to as “my Walker poem” and “a fable of youth, sweetness, and search,” today feels overwrought, overwritten, straining for lyricism: “Somewhere below they were roasting coffee, handling spices—the odor was in the pillars, in the battered wooden planks of the promenade beneath my feet, in the blackness upwelling from the river.” Lots of such passages occur in a book that often reads as if written by Walt Whitman bloated on matzah brei. The other two volumes of Kazin’s autobiography are blighted by Kazin’s need to score off enemies, left and right, real and imagined. Remove these portions about his enemies and the books go up in smoke.

( emphasis my own! Matzah Brei - is Jewish Scrapple sans pork)

You can soak up Joseph Epstein by clicking my post title. If Studs Terkel is a "Chicago Treasure" he is surely in his proper place, now; Joseph Epstein is readily available. Thank God!

Studs Terkel? Labor Day Celebrates Working People Not Posers

Lefties live on a diet of BS. The more BS they shovel in, the more strident they become e.g. the Chicago media call SEIU Big Labor. Whenever labor is used in newsprint, think SEIU. Remember the Big Box BS? Jane Addams has an expressway named for her; why?

Jane Addams, truth to tell, stabbed the Amalgamated Meat Cutters in the back in Sept. 1904, after a violent and horrifically hot summer on strike against the Meat Packers. A vote was called to continue the strike at the union hall on 47th & Ashland. Hours later a Jane Addams and her delegation of short-haired women activists, who pretended to stand with the strikers, met with union President Michael Donnelly. Three hours later Donnelly called off the strike. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters got nothing. Donnelly faded into obscurity and died under mysterious circumstances. Try finding anything on Michael Donnelly in modern labor history, the Chicago Encyclopedia, or anywhere on the web. He was as Orwell warned, disappeared. Like the old timey Lefties are wont to say, 'You could look it up!' I did. Go through the New Times and Chicago Trtibune 1904 archives -fascinating reading. (STRIKE IS ENDED; MEN SURRENDER.
Chicago; Sep 9, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985))

Jane Addams has a nice stretch of highway running Northwest toward here home town Cedarville, IL. Jane Addams got herself a Nobel Peace Prize, taking credit for the work of others.

This morning, Carol Marin offered another heaping helping of BS and called for a Studs Terkel rant for Labor Day. Why? Don't ask. He's a treasure.

I miss Studs.

I miss his laugh. His martinis. His stories. But this weekend, I’m missing what he would say about working. Or — for so many desperate Americans right now — not working.

It is Labor Day weekend and the news is grim:

In August, there was no job growth, the first time in a year there has been no monthly jobs growth.

Studs Terkel died Oct. 31, 2008, at 96. He was the greatest listener of the 20th century. Armed with a tape recorder, a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity, he asked normal, everyday people what they thought and felt.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for his book The Good War, and received the Presidential National Humanities Medal in 1997.

But it’s his 1974 book, Working, that’s on my mind.

The unemployment rate remained stuck at a dismal 9.1 percent in August.

Work helps define us. Gives us pride. Puts food on the table and pays for the tuition that sends our kids to college. And yet America, a huge swath of it, is not working right now.

Studs did exactly what? He recorded people's stories and did not share the royalties and won awards, and played records on Public Radio and spun yarns on Public Television.

Studs did alright for himself. I grew up in a fiercely union house. I have met real labor heroes and a very few villains.

There are old timers who actually had their heads spilt by company goons. Like combat veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam and our current wars with Islamist terror, they never cashed in on their efforts.

Studs Terkel did pretty well on their efforts however. Like Jane Addams, Studs Terkel is remembered because of the diet of BS, than by any real efforts.

I met Studs Terkel once when my late wife Mary was a waitress at Arnie Morton's in the early 1980's. I was waiting for Mary to get off work and she introduced me to Studs. I was teaching English at Bishop McNamara in Kankakee and came home to Chicago on the weekends. I had read Working, in fact Hots Michaels, the great jazz pianist for the old Scuttlebutt Lounge and Chicago Chop House, Mount Carmel grad and life-long pal of my uncle Jack was featured in Working. I asked about Hots. Studs asked 'Who?' Hots Michaels he is featured in the beginning of Working.

"Oh, yeah, . . .Hots," and the man of people got up tossed two bucks on the table for Mary and shuffled off to Buffalo.

My uncle Jack, Hots Michaels and a bunch of guys including Nelson Algren played cards together. It seems that Studs Terkel played a few times. Hot Michaels was a great musician and Chicago legend. My uncle Jack was a stationary engineer at the water station on 35th Street.

Studs Terkel put Hots in his book. I am sure Hots Michaels never saw nickel one, nor did he care.

Studs Terkel had his work and his success. Labor Day is about labor and the fight for a living wage, an eight hour day, and the dignity of work.


The late Tom Roeser respected working men and women. He knew Studs Terkel.

Her( Carol Marin) first column was to celebrate that 14-carat phony with a self-embroidered history of radical activism from yesteryear, Studs Terkel, 96, a self-promoting agnostic windbag who named one of his kids after declared Communist stage actor and singer Paul Robson and , to hear Terkel tell it in his rasping voice which thrills his listeners since they fathom the real man of the street is talking… marched with the Wobblies, braved assaults from the club-wielding goons in the Armour strike, endured beatings with Walter Reuther in the Detroit sit-down strikes of the 1930, fought the white racists who opposed blacks swimming off a South Side pier in the 1920s, was black-listed because of his opposition to that hideous Joe McCarthy…all the stories inflating in coloration by the year-some invented out of whole cloth--while Ms. Marin beamed expressively and accepted his supposed man-in-the-street lingo as true genre.

As the late Steve Neal, no conservative, pointed out in a column Terkel never did anything of note for the “working class,” is in reality a b.s’ing blatherer of tales who would long since have been thrown out of a neighborhood bar for inculcating terminal boredom, since he has lived far longer than most and has license to exaggerate scandalously without fact-checking. Aside from a brief acting career on early TV, Terkel’s has done nothing noteworthy except to snap on a tape recorder and capture stories from first-hand participants for which, as a canny capitalist, he paid nothing but from which he made a fortune for himself-beginning with “Division Street America.” A self-proclaimed man of the people, he deliberately never learned to drive and rides a bus, taking care to sit by the window where he, festooned in his red-checked shirt, can be quickly glimpsed. I debated him once at Bughouse Square. A coward when confronted, this giant puff ball self-inflated turned into a clawless pussy cat. I actually went easy on him after he caved. It was the first time he was ever called on any of his stories because his recollections were at variance with history. Marin the dilettante swallows it all.

Labor Day and every day lets lay off the BS. It makes fat heads.


http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/7429803-417/labor-day-needs-a-studs-terkel-rant.html

Betty Loren Maltese Should Host Chicago Public Radio

Updated: Friday, 14 May 2010, 9:39 AM CDT
Published : Friday, 14 May 2010, 8:44 AM CDT

FOX Chicago News

Chicago - Former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese says she wants to pursue a career as a radio talk show host.

Betty Loren-Maltese — the former Cicero town president recently released from prison — is scheduled to co-host on WVON radio Monday. Whatever you think of the idea of yet another felon behind a Chicago radio mike, there's a bright side:

At least she's a woman.

Mary Schmich Chicago Tribune



Agreed! More woman felons are needed on our Chicago airwaves = Fresh Air! NPR for Betty Loren Maltese. I get a huge kick out of Betty! Hell, I'd even drop an envelop stuffed with nickels to support "Listener and Federal Government Sponsored Radio! WBEZ!"

Shoot, Mayor Betty was an employee of the Federal Government and has been thoroughly vetted. She knows the works and I'm not talking about a Palermo's thin Crust - Insider Politics, Systemic Racism, Gay and Lesbian Life Issues, Convicted Radio Hosts

Imagine - if you will:

BLM- "This is ( cough) Fresh Air with Betty Loren Maltese, with my guest WVON Host and former Club Fed Alum Cliff Kelley - Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Friend of the Community Hall of Famer. First off Cliff, I need to ask you this question - it is standard NPR policy and practice - Studs Terkel? Wasn't he a Treasure?"

CK- "That he was, Betty."

BLM- ( Cough, hack) Cliff, ( cough) disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich gets on WLS every hour on the eights - what's with that? He has not even been convicted and yet a Chicago Radio Station has given him a spot when he wants it -when he wants it."

CK- " Betty it makes you wanna holler and go Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm."

BLM- "Cliff, ( cough, cough, hack) I see see this as an affront to the Gay Lesbian Community, the African American Community, and to women everywhere. Now, I am a breeder, but I stand in solidarity with every oppressed minority.( cough, cough, cough hack) I gotta lay off these Ginny Slims. (cough)

CK -"Betty, I stood the time for doing the crime and there were plenty of others that should have put on DOC jumpsuits, but for race, gender and lifestyle hegemony controlled by whitey."

BLM - "We'll be back ( hack, hack, cough) with more Fresh Air!"

Sponsor Voice Over - "If you are making that first uncomfortable and life-changing move and suing the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County States Attorney because you are in Pontiac State Prison and you'd really like that new Mercedes-Benz G-Class 'an all the Trim that it can hold,G'- speak to the Law Pros at G. Flint Taylor's Peoples Law Office - You will be two-thirds on the way to your Jackpot! Urban Translator available upon request - and a substantial fee."

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-04-23/news/ct-met-schmich-0423--20100423_1_radio-host-car-radio-older-women

http://www.glhalloffame.org/index.pl?item=114&todo=view_item

'Shoeless' Joe Took the Dough and Only Buck Weaver Died Game

Two more lawyers have joined the Progressive chorus to Free Shoeless Joe Jackson from the bribes that he took while helping Ed Cicotte of the Chicago White Sox and Arnold Rothstein of the American Gaming Interests fix the 1919 World Series.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-talk-clear-shoeless-joesep09,0,556801.story

Swell. You guys are a few months late - Studs Terkel is off the air.

The late loud-mouth and Chicago buried treasure Studs Terkel was a huge advocate for the Free Joe Jackson movement. He did so only to sully the name of White Sox Founder and Owner Charles Comiskey and push victim politics. There are victims, but Progressives tend to make perpetrators ( Mumia, Most Gang-bangers, Libya, ACORN and Van Jones) appear the victim by heaping more horse manure into a moral mountain.

Yesterday, I passed the gates of Mount Hope Cemetery, where last week families and investigators were looking into allegations that more African American families had deceased loved ones disrespected by persons tasked with keeping their burial plots. Chicago White Sox Great and the only member of the 1919 Team tainted by the FIX and absolutely innocent of taking bribes from Rothstein, George Daniel 'Buck' Weaver is buried at Mount Hope.

Buck Weaver does not enjoy the 'victimhood' anointed to the eyes, mouth, temples and ears of Shoeless Joe.

Buck Weaver was a stand-up guy and would never rat-out his teammates, let alone help fix a game in anyway. George Weaver took his infamy with stoic heroism. Shoeless Joe has lawyers, crumbs and money.

Shoeless Joe was a dumb-as-dirt phenomenon. He sold his gifts and talents for the coin of the corrupt. However, he wanted his bat and ball back.

Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis ruled. Baseball, from Judge Landis on down to Bud Selig, has denied attempts to clear anyone that the Landis Ruling banished from Baseball. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama wrote to Commissioner Selig in attempt to clear Buck Weaver, but that was before he became President of the United States. I'll bet the President could clear Buck. It was damned great of Sen. Obama to try and right a genuine wrong in 2005.

Shoeless Joe took the money and Buck Weaver did not. Joe Jackson got exactly what he wanted and immediately. Only Buck Weaver is Pure. I hope his grave remains as unsullied as his great heart and soul.

In 2004 Tribune Sports Legend Dan McGrath conducted a forum along with Dr. David Fletcher of the Baseball Museum at the Chicago Historical Society to clear Buck Weaver.

Chicago Treasure Studs Terkel, a Shoeless Joe Confederate, did not participate. Buck Weaver did not inspire Folk Songs on Public Radio and Dirt-Poor, Dumb-as-Dirt Shoeless Joe certainly did. You see clearing Buck Weaver would also clear Charles Comiskey -owner of the 1919 White Sox who is the goat in all of this Progressive Clap-trap.

Here was what the late World Class Word Moocher StudsTerkel offered to the New York Times following the Chicago White Sox 2005 Championship - "If there had been real justice after the scandal of 1919, Charlie Comiskey, the Sox owner, would have been the one kicked out of the game. That year, the star pitcher Eddie Ciccote had been promised a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games; as he neared the mark Comiskey had him benched for the remainder of the season rather than open his wallet.
But there was nothing the players could do. Most weren't very worldly -- Shoeless Joe Jackson couldn't sign his own name -- and they couldn't change teams. They were serfs of the owners. "

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E5DC1E3FF93BA15753C1A9639C8B63

Hoist the Red Flag, Studs, you mope. The serfs took bribes, all but Buck Weaver. Baseball as Class Warfare - and this goof is an icon?

Well, now Studs is stealing ideas and stories from Gunga Din while he pours drinks to 'poor damned souls.'

Charlie Comiskey paid his players according to the contracts that they 'in good faith' signed after they agreed to comply. Comiskey has been tarred by the Progressives as a tight-wad. However, Comiskey cared more for the people who came to the games than the sociological implications of Shoeless Joe's poverty and ignorance.

George Daniel 'Buck' Weaver was the only pure Chicago White Sox Player in the 1919 Scandal. Charles Comiskey was a victim too.

*WEAVER DIES GAME AS REDS ROLL ON
Cincinnati Post
October 10,
1919
By: Ross Tenney
Though they are hopeless and heartless, the White Sox
have a hero. He is George Weaver, who plays and fights at third base.
Day after day Weaver has done his work and smiled. In spite of the certain fate that closed about the hopes of the Sox, Weaver smiled and scrapped. One by one his mates gave up. Weaver continued to grin and fought harder. Cicotte and Williams fell and the Sox were two games to the bad. Weaver’s smile never faded. His spirit never waned.
Cicotte tried again and failed. Williams made his second game ttempt butthe Red Juggernaut rolled on. In that sixth inning when Moran’s men sluggedand pounded the Sox into submission, Weaver pulled his cap lower over his eyes and grinned. Two of the Sox hits were lined out by his bat.
The Reds have beaten the spirit out of the Sox all but Weaver. Buck’s spirit is untouched. He was ready to die fighting. Buck is Chicago’s one big hero; long may he fight and smile.



George Daniel ‘Buck’ Weaver “A joyous boy, all heart and
hard-trying. A territorial animal…who guarded the spiked sand around third like his life…”
- Nelson Algren,“The Swede was a Hard Guy” in “The Last Carousel”

http://www.clearbuck.com/pdf/Online%20-%20Newsletter%208.pdf

GQ City - Now that's something! . . . What - I have no idea!

Chicago is a Gentleman's Quarterly (GQ) City and Chicago's Media is abuzz and a tingle with raffishly preening pride!

Craven sophisticates like Billy Dec, the late Studs Terkel, former Aldermen Burt Natarus, Arenda Troutman, rocker and Uncle Fester look-alike Billy Corgan have helped make this City. Sing with me now, that great Folk Ballad by fellow Cosmopolitans Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill & Frank Beard! That Chicago GQ Anthem that always brought a smile to Studs Terkel when he trod the terra! Come on Chicago! Forget the Thugs on your back-porch! Sing Out!

Clean shirt, new shoes
And I dont know where I am goin to.
Silk suit, black tie,
I dont need a reason why.
They come runnin just as fast as they can
Coz every girl crazy bout a sharp dressed man.

Gold watch, diamond ring,
I aint missin a single thing.
And cufflinks, stick pin,
When I step out Im gonna do you in.
They come runnin just as fast as they can
Coz every girl crazy bout a sharp dressed man.

Top coat, top hat,
I dont worry coz my wallets fat.
Black shades, white gloves,
Lookin sharp and lookin for love.
They come runnin just as fast as they can
Coz every girl grazy bout a sharp dressed man.