School: Young People Go to School and Some Make 'Mugs in the News' and Others Achieve

“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.” – G.K. Chesterton

Wouldn't that be something?   Schools are created by people who have something to offer to younger, or less knowlegeable people.  The best schools offer something of value that honors Truth, Nature and our Creator.

Schools are formed by people who share common values and skills that converge to bring people from one place in their lives to another, be it one of the 1st Tier Elite Prep Schools that shape future Secretaries of State and Members of Secret Societies, a co-educational Chicago Public School in Auburn Gresham, Roseland, Englewood, or Garfield Park that warehouse 9-12 year so that one out of score students score above a 20 on ACT exams and less than half graduate, or a Catholic all-Male college prep high school where 90% of African-American students who begin their schooling in its halls graduate and every graduate is welcomed to four-year college or university.

Our American public schools have become places that glare Halogen lighting on politicians.  Elected officials comprise the Board of Directors to Public Schools.  Elected politicians are the Carnegie Endowments of the 50 States without whom nothing remains done.

My assertions are arguable with regard to public schooling, but the fact that everything about public schools links directly to some career political grifter.

Marcus Aurelius endowed the first school at Athens in because he believed that a good person should lead a life honed by reason. Aurelius was a Stoic by temperament and outlook; yet, he created a School for each of the Dominant Philosophies Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic and Epicurean.  He was no Ted Turner, or Bill Gates.
By the way, Emperor Marcus Aurelius persecuted Christians as brutally as Bill Maher of HBO would love to do.

Schools operated on endowments so that scholars ( people who showed up at school to teach or learn) develop themselves through immersion in the many disciplines that merged to a core belief, or philosophy.

When Romans allowed barbarians to protect them from barbarians, schools vanished.

From the 5th Century until John Dewey, schools were centered on God.  Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Wittenburg and Escorial were Royally endowed.  John Scotus Erigena, Boethius, Augustine,  Cassidorius, Aquinas, William of Occam, Roger Bacon,  Anselm, Ignatius, Gonzaga Descrates, and Gregor Mendel managed to have great impact on human justice, human development and the humanities in spite of the fact that they were pious Christians.  Catholic schools remain, or should remain, in this tradition.

Public schools came about when Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806.

I could almost hear Mike Klonsky and Jesse Sharkey's noggins explode.  No, that was not a bomb planted by UICC Department of Education retiree, terrorist Emeritus and Obama sponsor Bill Ayers. That was the Battle that created a Godless school - Public Education.

The result has been Mugs in the New and a Chicago Homicide Rate that spikes each weekend - come rain or shine.

On my side of street, dominated by a four story fortress of Virtue designed by Joseph McCarthy who was Daniel Burnham's Catholic-go-to-guy when spending Cardinal Mundelein's money, a Catholic high school serves the exact same clientele as Simeon, Crane, and the former Calumet high schools - young men of African American heritage and mostly ( 80%) CPS elementary graduates.

All young men ( teenage Man Childs) are willful, proud, loud, playful, fidgety, distracted, horny as goats and in need of guidance, instruction and an occasional kind word.  Inner city black kids educated according to the secular Hegelian John Dewey constructs are exponentially more so.

Public school teachers told them "We don't do that!"  Catholic school teachers can tell, Pat Hickey to quit farting, explain is tardiness in 250 words double spaced and shape up or he will die on the gallows, IN THUNDER because Christ, His Mother, the Holy Spirit and God of Abraham expect more of him.

A Public school teacher says, ' We don't do that."  A Catholic school teacher explains why one's actions have consequences well beyond his immediate impulse to folly.

Here is a better explanation.  Yesterday, I was delighted to shake hands, fist bump and hug a seventeen year old kid who was expelled two years ago.  This young gent has had a horrific life.  He was shuttled from one foster care home to another from the time he was six years old until he turned fourteen for a total of seven placements. A relative took him in and sent him to Leo High School as a freshman.  Troubles ensued - tardy, absent, disrespectful & etc. The kid is smart, tough as algebra and has an inner sweetness that belies his troubled young life.  He is among the brawny stalwarts hugging Francis Cardinal George in 2011 in the photo that accompanies this prose. In fact, Cardinal George counseled the young man on the quiet.

For two years, this talented and handsome young guy attended a neighboring public school and went  "All Street."  He caught a beef - a serious beef.  He was arrested and sent to Juvey and eventually lawyered his way out of the Juvenile Detention Center and is in the expungement process.  More so, this young man remembered why he was expelled from Leo High School and added up the consequences trailing his will to impulse in fall of 2011.

He is working community service hours. He was delighted that I still have his size twelve Stacy Adams black dress shoes on my office book shelf.  He left them with me upon expusion.  I asked him if he'd like to put the broggans back on and finish out at Leo.  He said, " If you'll have me back."

Hell, yes! Arne Duncan and Karen Lewis have had for too long.  This is a young man who might not punch a politcal clown in the nose, but he will dispute the secular nonsense pretending to schooling.

Young people is no stroll through Winnetka. . . .well, it is if you go to New Trier.

N.B.  By the way, two of the 100 Chicago Tribune Mugs in the News were known to my young friend.

School: A Catholic Core Invites Diversity and Happiness

General Rule: Public schools may not teach religion, although teaching about religion in a secular context is permitted.- AntiDefamation League (emphases my own)

I was taught Math, Chemistry and Physics in high school, but I seem to have learned only "about" those rigorous disciplines and have the grades to prove it. The fault, dear Reader, was in myself and not due to a class action lawsuit and subsequent legislation. I was and remain incompetent in the matters of quadratic equations, tables of elements and quantum mechanics, God forgive me.

I managed to have a happy and mildly successful life, nevertheless. My gentleman's Ds notwithstanding. Being taught Math, Chemistry and Physics by men of God made all of the difference.  The Augustinian Friars of my youth exacted a sense of awe for those studies in me. I learned I could read "about" those hard sciences and not plunge onto a career path where mediocre understandings are tolerated. I mix no potions, fly no plane, nor attempt to transform Nature.

American Public education is in the business of doing the work necessary for the growth of government.  Catholic Education is the means of producing centered people.  In public education, kids are a commodity and a tag-line.  Catholic schools require the growth of a young person's potential.  In public education students are weighed and measured and in parochial schools, young people are led to an acceptance that core values are good path to success.

Both educational systems succeed in the meeting their goals and objectives. One is showered with the mythical governmental doctrine of limitless tax dollars and the other must fend for itself.

The difference is simple God is not welcome in one and He is member of the faculty and staff of the other.

Public schools and charter schools are the same in that they cost families little to nothing.  Catholic schools, like all American private schools, cost a lung.

Public schools pay licensed teachers very well, but Moses, Jesus, or The Prophet could not be hired.  Catholic and private school teachers are paid somewhat of a salary,but  the above three historical persons would find themselves welcome in the faculty lounge.

I have worked in Catholic high schools with Muslims, Jews, Methodists, Lutherans and Catholics and found my life enriched and challenged by their collegiality; our kids learned and achieved lives of happy commitment to something beyond their urges and impulses.

I will devote my attentions for few weeks leading to the start of a new school year to the idea of schooling.

Having taken my gimlet-eyed view of public schooling in this initial few lines, I will avert my eyes of that public mess and focus on

• Young people - males largely
• What works with young people
• What does not work with young people
• What is needed in a teacher
• What is never needed in a teacher
• What makes a great school
• How to fund a great school
• How not to fund a great school

Let's see how I do.  I hope better than my canon of work for Fathers Klinger, Peotzinger and Scheible O.S.A. (circa 1966-70). 

http://archive.adl.org/religion_ps_2004/religion.html#.U9eMCeNdXD1
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-private-school-teachers-paid-less-than-public-school-teachers/280829/

Natasha Korecki Helps Illinois Voters Spot the Loonies - Early and Often

You can't keep goofs down and that is why these Room Temperature I.Q.s hold public office!

Love me some Commie Chanting!  Everybody!

Grassroots/Netroots
Basket full of Grapefruits
Readnot/Thinks less
Illinois is in a Mess!

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho!
We don't have no where to Go! (repeat . . .Early and Often)

You can not say that Progressive International is not having an impact - Elizabeth Warren is taken seriously . . . no really.

Here in Illinois, Cook County and Chicago we have an endless parade of goofballs, grifters and GooGo Fascists ( 3Gs) holding public office and looting our bankrupt communities six ways to Sunday.

Rahm Emanuel, once a 3G darling, and now considered a tyranical plutocrat ( he is THAT and change) Hell bent on destroying the PACS that masquerade as labor.  These PACs are the monster-sized public sector "unions" of wage slave workers decked out in Purple and Red XXXL t-shirts who happen to earn wages via tax-payers.

Grassroots are photo-op mobs chanting folks transported to rallies by the busload to threaten spineless dummies in elected office to tax the middle class out of existence.

Netroots are the fundmentally lazy college educated slackers and hipsters who Tweet anonymous HashTag slogans and threats.

Then there are the rest of us.  Some of read and a few of us retain the ability to manage an original thought.  We many, we unhappy many, we band of patsies! We pay, we will pay, until we have nothing less than resignation and we too beg for XXL Purple and Red T-shirts and the concomitant wage-slavery of a husky $15 an hour.

The American middle class and its robust standard of living was created in large part because of American :Labor - Real Labor.  Real labor are the skilled and low skilled Industrial trades who fought, not Scott Walkers, but Fords, DuPonts and Rockefellers for right to fair wages.

Progressives too coin from guilty Fords, DuPonts and Rockefellers and put it to great use underming and now strangling the American Middle Class as it gasps for its last breath.

Thanks be to God and Natasha Korecki of the Chicago Sun Times the Illinois Band of Patsies a heads up on the Netroots and Grassroots carpetbaggers re-settled like Rahm Emanuel himself in Sweet Home Chicago to place a new generation of goofs, grifters and Goo-Go Fascists into public office.  This is the second such report from the writer who provided the most accurate and clear prose on the unmasking and ultimate pants-yanking of two Progressive frauds - Rod Blagoyevich and Congressman Jesse Jackson, Junior.

Natasha Korecki warned of Progressive International's shop-set-up in Illinois and the bridge to the Karen Lewis City Hall Expedition.

Now, Korecki links the Grassroots/Netroots Coalition of Leeches in its Chicago, Cook County and Illinois campaign -

Look out Chicago, a new political movement has arrived.
United Working Families, a partnership between labor groups, including the Chicago Teachers Union, and a coalition of a dozen community groups is expected to announce its formal launch on Monday, executive director Kristen Crowell tells Early & Often.
Crowell is the same woman who headed an effort to counter policies by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, raising $50 million along the way.
“This organization collectively will represent well over 100,000-plus members in a diverse range of communities in Chicago,” Crowell said of the Chicago group.
Crowell previously served as executive director of We Are Wisconsin, which grew out of protests in 2011 and eventually cultivated its battle into a full-blown recall election against Walker.

Remember the drum-circle jerks who camped out under the Madison Wisconsin Legislature rotunda and chanted Death to Walker and Tremble Ye Running Dogs?  Kristen Crowell managed that tasty street theatrical and rooted in the likes of Big Ed from MSNBC and Michigan Fats himself, Michael " 9Mansions" Moore.

Walker, if you will recall, was not Recalled and led his state out of fiscal water-boarding without killing off Organized Labor.

This time, however,  the Madison Class warriors and  Hipster Hobos will dress up like Chicago's Stan from Streets and San, Eddie the Electrician, Doreen the Dockworker  and Framin' Eamon the Irish Carpenter.  

You see, its all bout us, this time. Us, the Band of Patsies.

The Cadillac Commies are now the champions of the working mom and dad and all of their disgusting Catholic school attending spawn.

The natural Progressive contempt for We Band of Breeders is on hold until a thick cadre of creeps hold more elective offices than we can afford.

Still, it’s no coincidence. The Chicago group has been in discussions with the Working Family Party — a progressive group that successfully backed candidates for office in various states — about modeling some of their programs, including community outreach and candidate training. . . . Crowell said the group is developing its political strategy, including whether it will back a slate of aldermanic candidates.

“Certainly, it is our opinion that the current leadership is not doing enough to take care of our folks,” Crowell said. United Working Families will focus on “finding, recruiting and supporting candidates who are going to be with us.”

“It’s not about elected officials, it’s about members having a role and having a voice in Chicago.” 

I have a voice and I have very nice baritone.  I sing out when I am delighted and wail up a storm when creeps like Elizabeth Warren, Jan Schakowsky, Wee Mike Quigley, Dithering Dick Durbin and Governor Pat Quinn want to side with me and mine.  But that's just me.

Natasha Korecki told us to " Look Out, Chicago!"  Now, lets see if the Progressive 2 X 4 whacks the Band of Patsies between the eyes and continues to murder the American Middle Class.

Evolution's Greatest Error - Progressive International - When PC Meets Reality: A Monkey's Tale From Delhi.

Evolution is a theory that morphed into progressive truth ( inquiry) at the tail end of the Nineteenth Century.  Charles Darwin's observations from the gunwales of HMS Beagle clicked nicely with late Victorian Social Enthusiasm - secular religion.  The Dawn of Evolution broke with the birth of the Do-Gooder .  The fundamental questions that lead to truth were shouted down by parlors full of enthusiastic social theorists armed with Hegel, impatience, steady incomes from factories, tenant farms and royal largess, as well as political power. Artists and scribblers flocked to these parlors in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and New York to find fortune, fame and force the less gifted to pay attention to them.

Art linked arms with Progressive Pontiffs and soon Emile Zola turned the reading of literature into an autopsy of society. Soon literature became the path to power, in the words of Marxist literary critic Irving Howe, because “it struck me as the easiest major, where I could bullshit the most.”

It is a short jump from the printed page to political power for Progressives - it is a very exclusive Masonic Order.  In no time at all social theory became doctrine and later law.

The first law of the Progressive is Be Contrarian in All Things but Matters of Personal Wealth.  The rich are always bad and only the rich can destroy their evil.  Convicts are always better than jailers.  Working people are great, so long as they do not ride in the same elevators as a Progressive.  Debt makes Wealth. Liberty is fascism. And, so it goes.

Science can mean anything so long as it supports the meme du jour.  Darwin managed all of this by watching monkeys. Let's consider our ring-tailed cousins in Dehli.  You see in Hindi India monkeys are sacred on Tuesdays and Saturdays in honor of the monkey faced Hindu god Hanuman

Now, there are many types, classes and races, if you will, of monkey - langur, rhesus & etc.

The langur is a  grey black-faced fellow  with temperment an old timey Irish Cop.

The rhesus is a pain in the ass.  There are many more Rhesus monkey's than langur monkeys, because the Langur is on the endangered list, because he was so God damned mean, nasty and dangerous. The much more numerous, smaller red-faced Rhesus monkey is scared shitless of the langur.  In the past, langur monkeys were used by Indian Entrepreneurs to patrol neighborhoods plagued by troops, nay regiments of Rhesus cousins.

However, Politically and Environmentally Correct Doctrine afflicted India, no less than it has in Big Gulp NYC, or Rahm's Chicagoland.

India’s rhesus monkeys are derelicts. They regularly steal food, alcohol, glasses, medical equipment, and clothes. They even break into cars.
To combat them, the langur men used to be a common sight around Delhi’s political and diplomatic areas, especially during visits by high-ranking foreign officials.
The problem is, it’s illegal to keep langurs. They are a protected species, and in November 2012, the environment ministry cracked down. The ministry told government departments and agencies that langurs are covered by India’s Wildlife Protection Act, and that people who own, trade or hire out langurs face up to three years in jail. (emphasis my own)

Like the cell-phone in the hands of an SUV & Starbucks armed soccer mom from Naperville, the langur monkey continues to patrol the streets of Delhi.  Statisics from pre-caste polling services, like Paul Simon Institute are used to draw up laws made confound common sense and what was formerly known as Nature.

Langur monkeys do not make great pets, because they huge nasty-tempered brutes, but they make great wonderful riot-control deterent enforcers of mobs of felonious rhesus monkeys.  What would Darwin say?
Probably, ' once the rhesus has fully evolved through  after-school, programs, frees schooling and breakfasts, unchallenged access to government housing, health care and rise in the minimum wage Dehli will have even more rhesus monkeys.'  Instead, the same Government officials who ban the ownership of langurs, hire the outlawed langur leash-holders to illegally do what Nature used to do - the rhesus monkeys out of the neighborhoods.

To cover up the hypocrisy, the Delhi Progressive apply contraceptives to monkey vitals in order to keep down the rhesus breeding:

The NDMC and the Delhi government are taking other measures too. The handful of monkey catchers employed by the council round up about 500 a year with their lassos.
India’s Central Zoo Authority has been working with the National Primate Center in California to reduce the monkey population by using contraceptives left in food and sterilization of captured monkeys. A pilot program is taking place in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
And the NDMC has been negotiating with an Indian company to supply electric shock tape for government buildings. The makers of Avi-Simian Shock Tape, which runs off a simple main socket, claim monkeys and birds receive a small electric shock when touching the aluminum wires in the tape. But for now the monkey population remains in complacent control of New Delhi.

If it is stupid, it is Progressive. 


H/T Sancte Pater

Chicago Media Giggle Up Karen Lewis, Because Toni Preckwinle Wont' ( Can't) Play

Karen Lewis, less than a yard from her Svengali Jesse Sharkey (ISO & CTU) got the giggles shared by our propaganda media!


Chicago's Media (read Editorial Boards) are just giddy over new, scientific polling numbers that show Karen Lewis is also leading over Rahm Emanuel - Toni Preckwinkle holds 55% and the CTU sock-puppet for Socialist Jesse Sharkey with nine point lead - in the soon to be fabulous race to replace Rahm. The Sun Times conducted a poll showing Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Karen Lewis beating the bejazuz out of Mayor Coon Eyes.

Lewis revealed on Monday she already has an unofficial exploratory committee in the works, a chairperson has been named and her camp is working to have a representative in each of the city’s 77 neighborhoods.
Since an Early & Often poll released Sunday put Lewis at a 9-percentage-point advantage over Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lewis’ phone has been ringing non-stop, she said.
“They’ve been coming from all over the country,” Lewis said in an interview Monday. “Facebook is blowing up. Twitter is blowing up.”

Blowing up like the great puffer fish!

Once again, Chicago sheep are encouraged to make the electoral choice of horse-poop, or manure.



Yep, you can not  beat the joy around the Editorial tables. They are happier than a teen age boy with two fish sticks.

Let's see, vote for Karen and Lewis and Jesse Sharkey becomes mayor; vote for Toni Preckwinkle and Dr. Quentin Young owns Chicago as well as Illinois.

Either way, Chicago fast-tracks to Detroit.

Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey ( you get one without the other . . .ever!) want all of us to know that they have Grassroots support!  That means MoveOn Dot Orgasm and Grassroots Illinois Action cranking up the happy!

“Another local group, Grassroots Illinois Action, isn’t backing a particular candidate.
However, field director Abbie Illenberger said the group is building both its member and financial base in hopes to possibly boost the right candidate’s campaign. Illenberger said the group’s work is in the backdrop of Emanuel having $7 million in the bank and having a SuperPAC that has the potential to match that amount. The mayoral election is Feb. 24, 2015.

Now here's the side-splitter, "The ability for regular, working people to run means we have to organize ourselves and do it collectively,” says Abbie Illenberger.

Regular, working people?  Karen? Toni? Alderman Bob Fioretti? \

 Frank from down Maplewood Street works for Streets and Sanitation, Molly who took a leave of abscense from CPS because Tim King's Urban Prep thugs loused up the elementary school she worked at, Jerry the African American copper who drives the wagon in 22 and Dewey the laborer with County are all regular working people.

I am around regular working people 24/7 and they can't stand any of the above mentioned just plain folks.

The same news media that gave America the Barack Obama gum-scraping it now enjoys and paved Chicago's pot-holed streets with 40 Weight Motor oil for Rahm's Carpet-bagging tenure as Mayor is giggling giddily to make two more mediocrities Chicago's Chief Executives!

Now that' old news.

I'm Hearing 'Gun Violence' is Bad . . .Everything Else is Just Dandy!

I heard the Chicago Police boss say that 17 deaths and 82 bullet mutilations is just unacceptable. He immediately shifted blame from shooters holding hand guns to his people with a John Deweyesque lab lesson, “We're square-rooting* nine ways from Sunday what is it that happened. Was it a fatigue factor? Did we give (too many) people (time) off? Because the fireworks were Friday and Saturday. That's where we had a lot of folks deployed during those time frames.” He admitted the numbers of bodies taking rounds was unacceptable,

I wonder, what exactly would be an acceptable rate of ballistic intrusions on carbon foot-prints over a few hours in Chicago?  A real headstratcher that one.

Mayor Chicagoland was equally huffed and puffed about the numbers, the optics and the growth of ballistic corporeal intrusions over Independence Day Weekend.These guys are almost mildy concerned enough to actually give voice to what everyone else in Chicago knows?

Not a chance.
In April when the temperatures spiked after the long Arctic Chicago winter, so do did bullet gusts and Rahm said,

"Every child deserves a childhood, regardless of where they live. But to do that, our city and community, the neighborhoods that make up this city, cannot live by a code of silence," Emanuel said at a news conference at an Edgewater school to announce more international baccalaureate programs. "They have to live by a moral code."

"Now I've read some of this, and I just want to say this, when some people go 'Well, it's the weather.' It's whether you have values," the mayor said. "Yes, weather's an impact. Where you put police is an impact. Whether you have summer jobs, after school programs, camps, summer reading programs. We have to do that and more."

And By Jingo, he did!  In fact he said so in the wake of 4th July fussilades, "While [Chicago is] providing record summer educational job opportunities and summer jobs, where is the federal [government] with assistance to expand that?"

Rahm knows that After School Programs do more to stop bullets* travelling between 770 -840 feet per second than decking out an entire neighborhood in T-shirts and marching behind Reverends at Gun Shops, or posting STOP GUN VIOLENCE signage hither and yon in ballistic afflicted neighborhoods.

Certainly, After School Programs do much, much more than having a well-led, well-manned and well-backed Police Department unencumbered by showers of pissy lawsuits and pissier media smears of cops doing their jobs bolstered by the pissiest of academic frauds with pie charts and mythopoeic yarns of systemic racism, brutality and working class contempt in bringing bad guys, cut-purses and sundry ne'er-do-wells to book for actual crimes.

After School Programs, especially when school is out for the summer, will end the bloodbath and bring Robert Redford's documentary crews back for another clear-eyed look at this Shooting Gallery on the Lake.

Boy, and all this time, silly me, I believed it was due to the fact that vicious, self-absorbed, bone-stupid and well armed thugs feel that they can get away with murder in Chicago, because Rahm, Daley, the Alderpersons, Toni Preckwinkle, Northwestern's Wrongful Industry, G. Flint Taylor, Locke Bowman,  Loevy & Loevy, both newspapers' editorial boards and icon columnists, WTTW, Pat Quinn, University of Chicago, CPS and too many grant-making philanthropies have made Chicago A Thug Comfort Zone. Thugs of all ethnic origins are surely welcome like this Evergreen Park native, sporting the fine old Irish/Viking name of Magnan.  Perhaps, when he came home from the Tattoo parlor sporting the Message at the center of what passes for his forehead might have indicated the road less travelled but certainly most bloody.

Science, my boy, science!

* Square Rooting -"Last year saw dramatic improvements after a particularly violent 2012 when Chicago topped 500 homicides for only the third time in a decade. But the momentum has appeared to slow so far this year. Through Sunday, homicides have dropped 5.6 percent, to 185, 11 fewer than the year earlier, police statistics show. But shooting incidents have risen to 953, up 5.3 percent from 905."

** Bullets in metric conversion -
Bullet Mass = 10.2 grams
Velocity = 230 meters per second
Energy = 282 Joules 

Terry Sullivan and the Chicago Jazz Caravan -Sunday July 13th at Skokie Library ( 3PM)

Event Type: Jazz Performance at Skokie Library: Skokie Public Library, 5215 Oakton St, Skokie, IL 60077
Age Group(s): All Ages
Date: 7/13/2014
Start Time: 3:00 PM
End Time: 4:15 PM
Description:
The Chicago Jazz Caravan is a roving ensemble of some of
Chicago’s most seasoned jazz players, performing music reminiscent of
the great mid-century jazz supper clubs.

Tom Muellner is a respected Chicagoland jazz pianist and composer whom Neil Tesser, the nationally recognized jazz critic and writer for Playboy magazine, called “a pianist and tunesmith of stellar magnitude.” Although he has played drums, guitar, bass and organ, Tom’s natural preference was always the piano. He grew up hearing many great jazz recordings, but related particularly to the unique piano artistry of Erroll Garner. Tom came to an important milestone in his twenties by discovering the genius of the late jazz piano master Bill Evans.

Vocalist Terry Sullivan sang in early music ensembles and small concert choirs before turning to jazz. An Ohio native, she has a degree in flute from Ohio University, but began singing after college. Anita O’Day and Blossom Dearie are influences, among others. Ms. Sullivan sings in intimate venues in the Chicago area.

One of Chicago's leading jazz trumpet artists, Art Davis has been a busy performer and teacher in the city since the early 1980s. Davis has toured with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, and Rosemary Clooney. As a charter member of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra (formerly Jazz Members' Big Band), he has appeared with Joe Williams, Kurt Elling, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Nancy Wilson, among others. He has also performed with such notables as Maynard Ferguson, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Tony Bennett. Art holds degrees in Music Education (B.M., University of Illinois) and Musicology (M.M., University of Illinois). As a graduate student, he specialized in ethnomusicology with an emphasis in African music.

Bassist Jim Cox has been a full-time freelance musician in Chicago for the past thirty years. He studied double bass with Dr. Ed Krolick and Jon Burr at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Jim maintains an active performing schedule and teaches at three Chicago-area colleges. He is an accomplished orchestral as well as jazz player.

Library: Skokie Public Library
Location: Petty Auditorium
Contact Number: 847-673-7774

Jewish Novels, Berlin Airlift, Leon Uris' "Armageddon-A Novel of Berlin" and Preserving Our Memory

“To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.” 
― Leon Uris

Dr. Suzanne Gossett was a great teacher in the English Department of Loyola University when I was an undergraduates in the early 1970's   I had a course in the Jewish American novel and we read Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.  I loved Malamud, liked Bellow, detested Phillip Roth and found myself conflicted about the other Roth.  Call it Sleep took a kid by the name of David Schearl from the age of six into early adolescence - the tale is very much like James Joyce's early pages of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man in its imagism and sexual iconography - only in Yiddish, as opposed to Jackeen Dublinese.

The book is a compendium of fear boiling in a little guy.  He gets bullied by family, Reb Yidall his Hebrew instructor, older kids and, of course, a Catholic thug named Leo who gives David a rosary and rapes his little sister.

I presented my conflicts to Dr. Gossett, the novel is powerful and beautifully written, but seems dangerous.  David is a victim for scores of pages and is only freed somehow - Deus Ex Machina -by a step-father who relents from killing the boy and a mother who finally offers him some level of psychological comfort. Call It Sleep is an angst-addict's dope.  I countered Henry Roth with Leon Uris was not part of canon of Jewish novelists in the Loyola offering.

Leon Uris had not time for Freudian, Jungian, or Hegelian deconstructions and dithering.  Jews faced the existential reality of extinction.  Now, that is a problem.

Uris wrote about the common humanity that just might save not only Jews but stupid and self-absorbed planet full of carbon footprints.

Dr. Gossett assured me that, while Leon Uris sold millions books, wrote the screenplay to movies like Gunfight at OK Corral and others,  he was no Saul Bellow.  However, . . ." I could write a paper."

I did - got a B- and noted from my mentress " B'nai B'rith would love your point of view on the self-loathing Jew."   I used Armageddon and Exodus to counter Henry Roth.  Thin gruel. Armageddon and Exodus remain truly great reads. Exodus chronicles the birth of Israel in the wake of Holocaust and Armageddon the Berlin Airlift - contemporary to Israel's geopolitical obstetric agonistes.

This month marks the Anniversary of Berlin Airlift in 1948.  I believe that this event happened to be as much of an existential threat to mankind. The USSR and USA et al were at daggers drawn with blood lusts still up from the Second World War.  Gen. George Marshall and the hundreds of anonymous pilots and crews who flew food and fuel into the Soviet blockaded city of Berlin made Stalin blink.

Leon Uris gives humanity fair warning "It Can Happen Again"  and when it does everyone, not just the Jews, are fair game.

We, all of us, do not have  the time, the temperament, the memory or the luxury to self-loathe.

Identity Assasins in Academics - Even an African American Icon is Fair Game.

"…and by that crimson setting sun, peace come to Forest Glade, and of the Redskins, they was none, but history had been made…" Tully Crow (Lee Marvin)                                             

                                       

                                             “It’s banned, o’course” Flann O'Brien

Chick Fil-A makes some serious bird.  One of Chicago's most hilarious alderman, the ever hysterical hipster of the 1st Ward Proco Joe Moreno attempted to ban Chick Fil-A from selling its high quality poultry treats within the Chicago city, because the owners of the fried chicken outlet are devout Christians and do not accept the meme that Two Dads make a Marriage, unlike the current Sonic fast-food commercials and that  is thought crime in au courant Chicago values.

Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, no stranger group thought, heartily agreed with Proco Joe Moreno and in so doing insulted millions of Chicago Christians, Jews and Muslims, as well as fans of tasty chickens.  Chick Filay is cooking up a storm in Chicago - six days a week, because the owners honor the Sabbath.

No ban. Ban Fail.

 

Americans who subsist on a diet of bullshit, a huge demographic, continue to ban books, flags, crucifixes, opinions that counter to pop culture and HBO, octogenarian slum-lord NBA franchise owners who pillow talk stupidities to the skank du jour, traditional marriage, and the Washington Redskins. 

Redskins will be banned.  I wonder if Joe Kapp* is yet angry about the insensitive franchise that drafted him into the NFL ? Joe Kapp is a Native American. 

Anyone can be banned or have one's identity 'disqualified' and ultimately 'disappeared.'   It is the American Intellectual Way dating back to Brook Farm, Ralphie Emerson, Dave Thoreau, Dr. Lyman Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, Jane Addams, John Dewey and Roger Baldwin.

Remember Booker T. Washington? John Carroll?  John Dos Passos? Commodore John Barry? Gen. James Shields?   Nikola Tesla?  Mary Harris Jones?  Of course not, as they have been all but effectively disappeared. 

Playing ball with the elite is progressive. Agree and do not disagree and everything will be just Jake.  It does not matter, one's level of achievement, valor, honesty, if the Gold Standard is violated a life, a book, an event is turned to lead by Progressive American Intellectual/Political alchemy.

Take Ralph Ellison, an African American author awarded the National Book Award when I was a wee baby.

Ralph Ellison was the subject of a biography that carved the dead Black up good and proper.  I read Invisible Man many times and students at Leo High School continue to read this singular novel.   Ellison was defended by none other than greatest living essayist of modern times, Joseph Epstein. Epstein took issue with the agenda Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad.  Unlike so many Americans, Joe Epstein never dines at the All You Can Eat BS Buffet. Voila~!

The tip-off for the kind of book Rampersad has written comes in its blurbs, four of five of which are provided by writers who comprise the main body of the African American intellectual establishment in America: the literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., the biographer (of W.E.B.Du Bois) David Levering Lewis, the philosopher Cornel West, and the novelist Toni Morrison. (Where, one wonders, was Maya?) In his play Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis has one of his characters say to another, "You are a disgrace to the Negro profession." This, really, is the charge, the organizing principle behind Arnold Rampersad's attack on Ralph Ellison: He was a disgrace to the Negro (now African-American) profession. Ellison would, of course, have understood, for there were few things he disliked more than the notion of black establishments and an African-American profession.
Here, without the tedium of his repeated charges, is Rampersad's bill of complaint against Ralph Ellison: He was an ungrateful son, a bad brother, a cheating and otherwise often cruel husband, an unreliable friend. He was a spendthrift (on himself), a cheapskate (when it came to other people), a snob, an elitist, an ingrate, ill-tempered; also condescending, disloyal, a sloppy, sometimes mean, drunk. Did I neglect to mention that he was a misogynist, pretentious, and without elementary sympathy for the young? And, oh yes, he was a boring teacher--though, for some unexplained reason, he failed to sleep with his students. Other than that he was not at all a bad guy.

I never thought Ralph Ellison to be a bad guy either so I took a look at an interview with Arnold Pampersad offered by Book Slut. 

It’s interesting to me that socially, at a certain point, he seemed to become interested in WASP patronage. In that respect, I don’t think he’s that different from certain Jews. In the book I [call it the] “platinum card of social prestige” associated with WASPs like Robert Penn Warren.. . . One thing that it could be said about Ralph Ellison and Jews is that he remained loyal to what he regarded as the best of Jewish culture to the end of his life. He never surrendered to any kind of anti-Semitism, even though his social climbings took him out of the world of Jews to the world of highly cultivated and wealthy WASPs. When Mrs. Guggenheimer, the person to whom he dedicated Invisible Man, died, he made a distinction between younger Jews and older Jews, who had known more suffering, who had greater difficulty in negotiating the territory between foreignness and Americanness and the old ways and the new ones. And he came down for the older people, who had paid a higher price for that negotiation of the American territory. That’s not a bad reflection on his part. It’s something a lot of people would sympathize with in seeing American Jewry.

Jews are the platinum card of social prestige? The WASP is the Gold Standard?  What valuation might Arnold Rampersad's semiotic hierarchy of valuation place an Irish Catholic from Chicago ?  Copper? Tin? Lead?

Among the many 'crimes' Arnold Rampersad indicts Ralph Ellison for future 'disappearnce' is the great man's refusal re- identify himself, much less allow snippy academic eunuchs to identify him.

:“Who wills to be a Negro?” Ellison says. “I do. I will to be a Negro. I’m proud to be a Negro.” Well, he should have recognized that many blacks could not say that and really mean it. I think he meant it. He believed in it. But they needed the therapy of the Black Power and black arts years in order to get a firmer grip on their sense of themselves and their belonging to America, even though there was a great deal of destructiveness that took place at that time. And I think, personally, that many people lost their way and might have been better served by being closer to Ellison’s definition of blackness or Negroness than the more volatile definitions that were emerging in the ’60s and ’70s.

How dare one? Easily, if you stands for something and refuses to fall for anything.

Well, ban me blind. 


*  Kapp was drafted in the 18th round of the 1959 NFL Draft by the Washington Redskins, who owned his rights to play professional football in the United States. After the draft, Washington did not contact him, so his only choice was to accept the offer from Jim Finks, the general manager of the CFL's Calgary Stampeders.