25 September 2008
Shut Up and Drink your Beer
"It's Gonna Happen!" say the signs in the windows of the four-story building where my son lives. It is like much of the city. The brick walls of the building have been re-pointed, and muscular Hispanic men are replacing the old fire escapes with wooden fantasy decks on the back.
This city is like nothing else in America. The Machine has kept it alive, or better said, the people who live here never gave up and left. They are pragmatic about their corruption, since it has kept this city alive when so much else in the Rust Belt has died.
You get a sense of it from the little things, like no fake sugar in the booths at the Salt and Pepper Diner on Clark Street just north of Wrigley Field.
I was not going to humiliate myself by asking some for something effete and East Coast, so I drank the steaming dark liquid straight, the way I did when I was young and my shoulders were strong. I ate a huge omelete of good Midwestern eggs and Wisconsin cheese with the steaming brew.
Walking back to the apartment to set up a virtual office, an outpost of Washington in the upper Midewest, I walked past the bars and souvenire stands that were shuttered in the Monday morning quiet .
The old stadium dominates the intersection, but give way to a peaceful enclave of towering trees and brownstone homes with the Romanesque touches of another century.
There is nothing like a September day on the North Side of Chicago. There happens to be a pennant race, and you can feel it in the flags hanging from the porches, the Cubs banners and the white ensigns with the big black letter “W” for victory.
This is the third National League Central Division title in the past six years, and the feeling is what is on the signs. “It’s gonna Happen.”
Chicago is about what works, and what is real. The old line about Chicago politics exemplifies the Daley Dynasty, father-and-son Mayors who bridge the time when poet Carl Sandburg was alive to the 21st Century.
"We don't want nobody who nobody sent." Terse. No whining. We are not going anywhere. Shut up and drink your beer, like it says on the T-shirt.
Of course, the city is the destination of the upper Midwest, and always has been, just like in the poem. There are more refugees than there once were. The joke is told among some of them with just a hint of wistfulness:
“Hey, you won the Michigan Lottery! You got a job in Chicago!”
I joke with the boys about the City of the Broad Shoulders line in Carl Sandburg’s short but epic story about the city by the lake.
Just imagine if both Chicago teams advance to the World Series! New York City has boasted the “subway series” many times, but the Cubbies have not been to The Show since 1945, and they lost then. They have not been World Champions since 1908- a magical century ago, when Carl Sanders was still vibrant and working on his biography of Lincoln, who was still al living memory.
Both teams have offered sweet deals to the 50 Aldermen who run the town in fealty to The Mayor: a pair of tickets to each post-series home games at face value, a=2 0savings on the street value of several thousand dollars.
The old ways coexist comfortably with the new. Four Cubs players on the active roster actually live in the neighborhood, within walking distance of the Stadium.
It is about memory. To placate the Yuppies of the lusher richer Wrigleyville, The Mayor has vowed to implement a seventh-inning beer ban. He is quite stern about it, and threatens to revoke the precious liquor licenses. Not only would the taps be turned off in the venerable stadium, but also in the ba rs clustered around it.
Presumably this would provide a cooling-off period and reduce the prospects of an immediate riot on international television, but others in the Machine have said that the ban would only be imposed only in the case of "a clinch game."
Of course, liquor sales could resume once the game is over.
Shut up and drink your beer. My son is in the freight business. Sandburg’s words about Chicago are better than anything I can muster. Nothing has changed:
HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over=2 0his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing! 0
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
Carl Sandburg’s (1878-1967) poems are now public domain.
Note: Alert Readers have pointed out that Birk's Economic numbers from the 24 September issue don't make sense. My apologies. There were a couple decimal points missing. Doesn't really matter, though, and it is not the point. Your Cocker Spaniel could have done as well as the idiots on Wall Street, and you can also trust the dog not to pee on the floor.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com