From Tamara to Vietnam

I think I finally understand the thing about Tamara now. I just wasn't getting it before.

Corporations, however, are a lot more complicated than that. I think you're right that it was better when families ran the businesses, and some of them still do. When a company "goes public", a lot of things change, and not always for the better. The reason a company sells stock in the first place is to raise capital, usually because they want to expand their operation. After the initial offering, the stocks are traded back and forth between people who have little to do with the operation, except for the board of directors who, between them, usually own a controlling interest (more than 50% of the stock). Many directors are on the boards of more than one company, so they must literally have more money than they know what to do with. Either that or they just like to manipulate things, like they were playing a grown up version of Monopoly. I don't know how much loyalty they have to the companies they rule, but I'm guessing "not much" because they will buy and sell them with alacrity, again, like a game of Monopoly. The rest of the stockholders are indeed just in it for the money but, when they think a company's profits are destined to grow, they bid up the price of it's stock, and vice versa. There is another class of stock traders called "bottom feeders". They will buy stocks of a distressed company, figuring that it has no place to go but up. I understand that, when General Motors was going through their bankruptcy, people were still trading their stock, even though it was almost certain that it would soon become totally worthless. I'm not sure what the motivation was behind that, but I certainly don't know everything there is to know about the stock market.

Customers may initially be drawn in by advertising but, if it's a product that they will run out of and have to buy more, like food, they won't keep buying it if they find out that they don't like it for some reason or another. A lot of advertising, both commercial and political, seems to be designed to appeal to people who aren't very smart. I suppose that's because there are more of them than us and the advertiser wants to get the most bang for his buck. I'm not sure if this is true for the political stuff, but commercial advertising is also driven by the desire to be remembered. An ad may be cute, funny, or just plain stupid. They don't care if you like the ad or not, just so long as it catches your attention and causes you to remember the name of the product. This was told to me a long time ago by somebody who had some experience in the advertising business, and I have no reason to doubt his word.

I think you're right that Russia was a mess before, during, and after Communism. I'm not sure why, but it might have something to do with their climate. That's one place where global warming would be an improvement. Also, it's so big, and has lots of different ethnic groups, kind of like us, only more so. Canada seems to be getting along just fine, although it's hard to tell because they seldom show up in our news media. Europe, on the other hand, has been in financial hot water for years now. Some people blame it on the European Union, and they may be right. People have been trying to unite Europe under one flag for centuries, and it has never worked for long. The current system is certainly more humane than their past history of constant warfare, but it remains to be seen if it will hold together in the long run.

I don't think that Sergeant Kaminski and I could have saved Vietnam all by ourselves, there would have needed to be many more like us, and maybe there was, but they were outvoted by the others. I've been thinking about that training exercise I told you about ever since it was dredged up from my memory banks, and there were a number of reasons why it went wrong. Fifty guys is big group to do escape and evasion, usually it's not more than a half dozen, and there's probably a reason for that. Our mission was to evade the enemy, not to engage them. Once our cover was blown, however, we needed a Plan "B". Sergeant Kaminski seems to have come up with one on the spot, but he was unable to communicate it to the rest of us in time because we were spread out all over the woods, which we needed to be for Plan "A". The main fault lied will the idiot who chambered that round. It was a distinctive sound that any GI would have recognized, and the forest had been really quiet up to that point. Maybe the exercise could have been planned better in the first place, but it still wouldn't have been idiot proof. Few thing are.

it's all the bottom line

The fact is that it is only in hindsight that we know that I didn’t get hired. When Tamara called me back across the continent there was a slight chance that I might get the job and her agency might have made some cash, whereas if I stayed home they would have certainly made zip, so if I am a stockholder she did exactly what I wanted her to do. She may well have had other local clients of hers also applying for the job, but the point is her company stood a better chance of making money if I were in the mix.

I’m glad you mentioned corporations, because that is one of the ways we went wrong. I am sort of pulling this out of my ass, but back in the day one guy or one family owned the company, and they may well have taken pride in their work, some of them anyway, and when the name Ford (I am going to use him as an example because, though he turned out to be a pretty bad man, he did appear to be somebody who took pride in his work) went on the car he wanted it to be a pretty good car because it was a reflection on himself, and he wanted to think he was doing the right thing for his workers too.

Some of those robber barons, once they had all those sacks of money, maybe they felt guilt, maybe they just wanted to do good works, maybe they wanted to get to heaven, but they ended up funding good works.

I don’t think you ever see that with corporations, oh they may give out a little to make their image a little better, but I’m sure that they never spend a penny more than they think they need to.

Because of the shareholders who don’t give a fuck whether they make a good or a crappy car because the only reason they bought the stock was to make money. Let a corporation announce that it is going to strive to put out the best product and costs be damned, and it is going to follow only the most strict ethical business practices, and it’s going to give generously to good works, and watch its stock price plummet like a stone.

I think you think there are far more people who take pride in their job rather than in their paycheck. I think your disappointments with the mill and the army was that there didn’t seem to be many people who took pride in their work rather than the paycheck.

And there is another thing, the advantage of putting out a good product at a good price is that people will notice that and flock to your store. But if you break it down, the reason they are flocking to your store is that you appear to them to be a good business, and so what is really important is how you appear to be, and if you put your bucks directly into appearance, you are spending them more wisely than if you put them into actually making a good product.

I guess I am thinking her of all those money guys who put out the ads with those dignified actors who used to play dignified characters on cop and trial shows who shill the product with integrity dripping from their mouths, or those health insurance companies who show a panorama of happy folks holding out their insurance cards to some cheerful sincere music, as if they were the ones who were going to do your triple bypass.

A little off the subject, just bugs me is all.

You know people point at Russia and draw the lesson that communism doesn’t work, but look at Russia. What would have worked there? They have some kind of capitalism now and they aren’t doing so hot, if it wasn’t for their oil they would be straight down the tubes. As prissy George Will once commented, name one product you would want to buy that is made in Russia. I was thinking of what would happen if we had tried communism in the US, but then we are way too cantankerous, but what about Europe and Canada? They aren’t commies, but they are much left of what we are, and they appear to be doing at least as well as we are.

But if we’d had Beagles and Sgt Kaminski in the jungles we would have won the war in Vietnam.

Doing Well by Doing Good

The thing is, Tamara didn't make any money for her agency because you didn't get the job. If she had been more conscientious, she would not have called you back all the way from Illinois for a job that you were unlikely to get. Rather, she would have searched among her local clients for a more appropriate candidate. I don't know how her commissions were figured, but she probably didn't get one in this case. If she was being paid a straight salary or hourly rate, it would have been no skin off her nose I you didn't get hired but, if she screwed up like that all the time, she eventually would have been let go. If she had been working for a state run agency in Soviet Russia, she would not have been worried about her work performance as much as she would have been worried about kissing up to her boss and looking good on paper. It seems, then, that a lot of American corporate executives behave more like commissars than capitalists. Why do you suppose that is?

Of course it's important that a businessman make money because, if he doesn't, then he will soon be out of business and not be able to provide goods or services to anybody. The flip side is that, if he doesn't provide goods or services at a competitive price, he will eventually go out of business anyway. I think the key factor here is the competition. Without it there is little incentive to keep your shoulder to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel, unless you have an internal work ethic, in which case you do a good job just for your own satisfaction. Even then, though, you need to keep an eye on the competition, or you might end up expressing your work ethic by chopping wood in the swamp for free. Well, that's not all bad either, provided you have some other source of money. Sometimes forces beyond your control intervene and it doesn't seem to matter what you do. Even then, however, you are responsible for your own destiny to a certain degree. You can't control what cards you are dealt, but you can decide how to play them, which ones to keep and which ones to throw away.

What's wrong with sausages? I thought everybody liked sausages. Be that as it may, I got to thinking about Sergeant Kaminski after I signed off last night. Funny the things you remember when one thing leads to another.

We were conducting an escape and evasion exercise. Escape and evasion is what you do if you end up behind enemy lines and are trying to get back to your own people. They were short on aggressors (bad guys), so we were told to pretend that every aggressor we saw was really 20 aggressors. Our orders were to avoid the enemy rather than to engage him, and to beat a hasty retreat if we made contact. About 50 of us were sneaking through the forest, all spread out and tactical, with Sergeant Kaminski in the lead. At one point, he held up his hand to signal us to stop, and then motioned for us to get down and keep quiet. We crouched there for 10 or 15 minutes before I heard somebody coming towards us, walking and talking like they didn't expect us to be there. There were only two of them, which meant 20, and they walked right in among us without a clue. I figured we would just lay low and let them go by, but somebody racked a round into the chamber of their rifle, "ka-ching!" Then everybody started shooting (blanks, it was just pretend) and, the next thing I knew, we were all retreating across this big open field, where we would have been sitting ducks if it had been real.

Later, I heard that Sergeant Kaminski was disappointed with our conduct, although we had done exactly what we had been ordered to do. He said that, since we had those aggressors surrounded, we should have stood our ground and "killed" or captured them. Orders be damned! Looking back on it now, I think that's why we won World War II and lost the Vietnam War. It was people like Sergeant Kaminski that won World War II for us, but now they had all been mustered out except one, and he was stuck in Berlin conducting fake wars with people who didn't have any more sense than to do exactly what they were told.

doing your job

Well perhaps I shouldn’t have used the term low-income to describe my social milieu at the time I was trying to break into the white collar world, I think riff raff would have been a more accurate term, you know folks who drink a bit, have trouble putting the rent together, have cars that are always breaking down, sometimes don’t show up for work, just because. This as opposed to people who worked in offices, who had a spouse and kids, who dressed nice, used good grammar, probably went to church. Those were the people who were held up as morally superior, but turned out to be shockingly deceitful and underhanded.

But you’re right usually in the pop books, and certainly in the movies, the poor people are all upright and kindly while their rich counterparts are drinking champagne from each others slippers and are morally dissolute. If the girl (who is always, despite some charming quirkiness, pure at heart) has a choice between a rich and a poor suitor, she will always choose the guy whose clothes are dirty but his hands are clean, and the audience will arise crying and laughing and applauding as the essential goodness of human nature is affirmed once again.

That’s the way the real world works isn’t it? That’s why when we walk through a neighborhood of rich people we keep our eyes open and walk as fast as we can, whereas when we walk through a poor neighborhood, we stroll casually without a worry in our heads.

Likely it is that underdog thing. I think we all have it in us. I guess we all feel that fate has not treated us as kindly as we deserved to be treated, and that when we triumph despite those long unfair odds against us, why it will only be right.

Right, those employment agencies don’t charge the job seeker anything. If he doesn’t get a job no money changes hands. If he does, the employer pays the agency who pays Tamara a commission.

Apparently Tamara cared more about her career advancement than she cared about actually doing her job

See I think Tamara was doing exactly her job. If I own the agency I am concerned with the bottom line, not with how many people get good jobs. The employment agency is a bad example because it is kind of complicated. Let’s consider your dad’s butcher shop. Is his job to provide fine meats at reasonable prices or to pay the rent and be able to send his kids to college, even if one of them would rather found freeholds? At first glance it might seem that his job was the former, but if he doesn’t do the latter, he will be out of business and won’t be able to provide fine meats to anybody.

If he was really into providing fine meats at reasonable prices, he could raise the quality of his meats and lower his prices, but he would probably go broke. If he was really into paying the rent and sending his goofy son to Yale, he could buy cheaper meats and raise his prices, but if he had any competition he would likely run out of customers and also go broke.

Well that is sort of just capitalism 101 isn’t it? I guess what I am trying to say is that the real mission of the butcher shop (and the employment agency, and the paper mill), is to make money, and selling meat (or etc) is only a way to do that. The prime mission of all three is to make a profit, not to provide services. There, that has a nice commie ring.

See, in the commie world, making a profit is not important, so that the paper mills and agencies and butcher shops, are only concerned with providing services well, and since everything is run by incorruptible new men who are concerned only with the welfare of the people, everybody has a good job and goes home to a fine steak for supper and afterwards pens a letter to the local free newspaper on the finest of paper.

I’m going to end up on that, because I don’t want to discuss sausages, Polish or otherwise.

Stereotypes

"We are kind of led to believe that low-income people are somehow not as morally upright as white collar types. It was my shock when I finally entered their world to discover how duplicitous they were."

Funny you should say that. I grew up believing just the opposite, and was surprised to learn that poor people are, on average, no more virtuous than rich people. I didn't get that presumption from my parents, who taught me that people should be judged as individuals, so I must have gotten it from books, television, and movies. In popular fiction, it seems that the good guy is usually poor, hardworking, honest, and kind, while the bad guy is fat, rich, greedy, and mean. You must have read some of the same books and watched some of the same shows that I did. How did we each get the opposite impression from them? Be that as it may, we both had to learn that, as Mrs. O'Hara used to say, "All generalizations are invalid."

I think I understand your evil Tamara now. I assumed that you were paying her to find you a job but, of course, sometimes employers pay an agency to find them likely candidates. Apparently Tamara cared more about her career advancement than she cared about actually doing her job, which is not unusual in the corporate world. The advancement of hourly workers is not usually affected by that kind of behavior, but many of them do it anyway. It must have something to do with human nature. Of course it's not an aspect of our human nature, so maybe we're not really human. You think?

It has been my observation that interracial couples are always a Black man and a White woman, I don't think I've ever seen it the other way around. Of course, I'm going by TV and movies here, you may well have seen it that way in your up-scale, cosmopolitan, sophisticated North Side world, but I haven't. I've seen White guys with Asian women and Hispanic women, but not Black women. Of course there was that thing they did back in the old slave days, but I wouldn't call that a "couple", with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson and Sally what's-her-name. There is probably a reason for this, and it has something to do with, you know, size.

This is not stereotyping, I saw lots of people in the shower when I was in the army, and I'm here to tell you that all men are not created equal. With very few exceptions, the Black dudes have way bigger wienies than the White dudes. The only White guy I remember with a shlong like that was Sergeant Kaminski, and he was Polish. We had two guys like that in the paper mill, one of them was an American Indian, and I think the other one was Polish, or maybe Italian. His last name was "Jana", but it was pronounced "Jany". So what kind of a name is that?

Sergeant Kaminski spoke barely understandable English, when he spoke at all, which was seldom, but he was well respected by everyone who knew him, and it wasn't because of his big wonker either. He had joined the U.S. Army in the field during World War II, at the age of 14 or 15. Of course he couldn't be officially enlisted at that age, but he joined them de-facto and fought alongside them until the end of the war. He joined on paper as soon as he was old enough, and had been in the army ever since. They didn't give him credit towards his retirement for those early years, which is why he was still in the army 20 years after the war. Most soldiers retire after 20 years, but a few old diehards make it to 30, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kaminski lasted at least that long. It was the only life he had ever known, and he was really good at it. We all agreed that, if the shit ever hit the fan in Berlin, we would follow Sergeant Kaminski anywhere he wanted to lead us. If he couldn't make it out of there alive, no one could.

the white collar jungle

I cut it off the story of Tamara Baum for dramatic effect. But it left both you and the person I originally wrote it to confused, so clearly I did not write it as well as I could have. When you are writing something you know all the facts and you think you can just hint at certain things, but that is not always the case.

Of course I really don’t know what was going on with Tamara Baum, but I am assuming it was business as usual, it was just that I didn’t know how business as usual operated. I was a country mouse entering the world of the city mice.

One point where I was led astray was that I thought that in some small way Tamara was my friend, that she would take my interests into consideration. It was that little chit chat that fooled me, a city mouse would know it meant nothing whereas a country mouse might think that if you were friendly to someone you must like them a little.

I think that what happened is that when the job came in, actually I think it was at a place called Bechtal, that they described the job to her just as they had described it to me, a not very good job, and one that I had no special qualifications for. She remembered me being in her office a few days prior and how desperate I was for any computer related job, and she figured that if she put me in that job she would get some kind of commission and some little gold star from the agency where she worked. When she described the job to me she built it up and also my chances of getting the job, because she had to drag me all the way back to San Francisco, spending the last of my money.

So her only interest in me was that she might get that little bump if I got the job. Once I didn’t, she had zero interest in me. She could have answered her phone and sympathized with me, or lied to me, or just said good bye or something, but why? She had no more interest in me, why waste fifteen seconds answering her phone?

That not answering a phone call is one that particularly bothers me. I have run across this situation several times in my life. They won’t say, “No we decided we aren’t going to hire you,” “No, we don’t want to buy your product,” “No, I don’t love you anymore, get lost,” but no, they just don’t answer and so the poor victim, thinking at first that the message didn’t get through, ends up making several phone calls before the sap realizes that the call will never be answered and feels like a fool.

Before I ever worked in an office, during those years of working in restaurants and as a janitor, people were pretty straight, if they didn’t like you, they didn’t pretend to like you, you always knew where you stood. We are kind of led to believe that low-income people are somehow not as morally upright as white collar types. It was my shock when I finally entered their world to discover how duplicitous they were. Everybody gives you a smile and a handshake, but the other hand is holding the shank, maybe to crawl up on top of your body, maybe just for sport because otherwise the office is a pretty dull place.

As far as the racial situation in Germany I am thinking another reason they were friendlier when they were fewer is that when they were fewer there were not so many bros to hang with, and so they had to hang with the white guys until they got enough of their guys.

What you said about the blacks going to their own bar to stay out of trouble with the crackers over white women sounds pretty perceptive. You know there is that thing, white guys don’t like seeing black guys with white women and black guys don’t like seeing white guys with black women, and likewise the women don’t like seeing their men go with women of another race.

It’s like you see that white woman with the black guy, and even if you know if she wasn’t with him, she still wouldn’t be with you, and maybe you wouldn’t even want her, but still it is one woman less in our pool of white women. Of course we also want free access to the pool of black women, which the black men don’t like because that is one less woman in their pool.

So What Was Going On?

Is there a part 2 of this story, or is the reader supposed to figure out what was going on from what you've already told us? I surmise from the title that Tamara was some kind of scam artist, but I don't know exactly what she did to scam you. Did she take your money, give you a false lead, and then skip town, or what?

I looked up Hetty Green, and I agree that she was quite a character. I think it's unlikely, however, that she sold the Gage Park property during the 1920s since, according to Wiki, she died in 1916. Her son Ned had been managing her Chicago properties for her, so maybe he was the one who sold the land to the developers.

I also looked up some Chicago neighborhood maps and found that I had indeed lived in the Gage Park neighborhood, at least officially. Chicago is officially divided into 77 "community areas", which most people call "neighborhoods". There are also unofficial neighborhoods within these community areas, some of them spanning parts of two community areas. The Gage Park community area encompasses everything between 47th Street and 59th Street, and from just east of Western to the railroad tracks that I told you about. Those tracks are the eastern boundary of a community area called "West Elsdon". It seems then, that some of the land east of the tracks should be called "Elsdon" or "East Elsdon", but it isn't, at least not officially. The Elsdon Methodist Church was east of the tracks, so that area must have been called "Elsdon" at one time. What I don't know is the eastern boundary of this elusive Elsdon, so I don't know if our house was included in it or not. If it was Kedzie Avenue, then we weren't in Elsdon but, if it was California Avenue, then we were. Funny, I don't remember anybody calling our neighborhood anything but "the neighborhood". Somewhere east of that was the "old neighborhood". There were also "bad neighborhoods" and "questionable neighborhoods". The bad neighborhoods were generally Black, but the questionable neighborhoods could be anywhere my parents advised me to stay out of unless I had a good reason to go there, and "hanging out" was certainly not considered to be a good reason.

After I signed off last time, I got to thinking about the interracial social situation in Berlin when I was there. Looking back on it, it seems odd that the Blacks restricted their downtown activity to that one establishment. I assume it was voluntary on their part because we were never told of any army policy or German law or custom that would require it. The more I think about it, I think it might have had something to do with the White women. I don't think I ever saw a Black woman in Berlin, so our Black guys would have no choice but to fraternize with White women. This would have been  considered outrageous conduct in those days, at least in the States, especially the Southern states. I don't think the Berliners would have been upset by it, but I'm not sure because I don't think I ever saw a Black guy and a White woman walking hand in hand down the street in Berlin.

Anyway, this place where the Black guys went, the name of which I do not remember, was a large Victorian looking building, surrounded by landscaped grounds, and enclosed in some kind of wall or fence. I only caught a glimpse of it once through the gate, but it looked like a nice place to me. It was too big to be just a bar, so it must have also been a hotel and restaurant. It recently occurred to me that it was a place where a Black guy and a White girl could get together without being seen in public. I don't know why I didn't think of it at the time, but I always was pretty oblivious to social crap like that. Of course everybody knew what was going on but, by keeping it out of sight, I suppose they avoided antagonizing people who cared about stuff like that. As the Black population increased, the old home place must have been starting to get crowded, so I suppose our Black brothers tried to expand their territory, which may have been what led to the racial violence I heard about after I had come home.

evil Tamara Baum

You know I don’t have anything today, so I am going to slip in a story I wrote to a friend just lately about how I tried to break into the straight white collar world.

After I got my data processing certificate in 1980, I was a little miffed to discover that I would have to write a resume and wear a suit. Well fine, if that was what was called for, I wrote the resume and bought a suit, and did the rounds of whoever seemed like they needed computer programmers, and despite the resume and the suit, nobody wanted anything to do with me.

Hum. My sister was living in San Francisco and surely there were computer programming jobs up the ass out there. I could just mail those companies resumes, but I had this thought in my head that they wouldn’t want to bother with somebody who wasn’t living there. So I flew out there, maybe I changed the address on my resume so that it would look like I was living at my sister’s, I don’t remember.

But the important thing was I would be arriving in person, that would impress them ever so much more than opening an envelope to see my resume. But as it turned out, I never got further than the teenage girl at the reception desk. Nothing doing. I did go to a head hunter in a fancy office. 

Tamara Baum was her name, we had a little conversation, about crossword puzzles I believe, and just some general chit chat at which I thought I was witty, and it felt like we were kind of friends.

But she had nothing for me either and I got on the big jet plane back to Champaign. Back to tending bar at the House of Chin, my dream computer job just clouds in my coffee.

But then there was a phone call. Of course I didn’t have a phone, so probably they called my sister who must have had the House of Chin phone number, so she called them and either I was there or she left a message and I called her on a pay phone. But the thing was, I had a job as a programmer in San Francisco if I wanted it!

Well not precisely, nothing is a sure thing, but Tamara was pretty sure it was mine for the asking, I just had to show up for the interview a few days hence. Well shit, I was almost broke. Paying for the flight to San Francisco would take me down to nothing. And it wasn’t even a sure thing. Should I risk it?

My sister thought I should, my parents thought I should, and really I thought I should. Isn’t that what life is all about, taking risks, following your dream?

I got on the big old jet airliner, and the next morning I was wearing my interview suit walking the downtown streets of San Francisco, looking like everybody else walking to their white collar jobs. Did I look like one of them to them? I was a little afraid that one of them would see right through me, and yell, “You’re not one of us Hippie, get off our sidewalks and go back to where you came from!”

But nobody did, and I got to the place and somebody there told me to sit in this room and wait. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and finally after maybe forty-five minutes I approached somebody timidly, and they were like there had been some kind of mixup or something, but they didn’t seem terribly upset by it and ushered me into the room of the great man who would be almost surely giving me my precious computer programming job.

Immediately afterwards and in the years since I have wondered about that long wait. I had been reading these books about interviewing and getting a job, there were all these things like what to do if they asked you what your worst fault was, and there were all these little tricks the interviewers might pull to test you, and one of them was to leave you waiting and if you passively accepted that, it meant that you had no mettle and probably were not anybody they wanted to hire. I have always wondered if that was the case, but I will never know.

Anyway it turned out that the job was not really a computer programming job, it was more like changing the tapes on the computer and keeping paper in the printer, and maybe sweeping up afterwards. And it was no sure thing that they wanted to hire me, in fact it wasn’t even a job yet, just something they were thinking they might do in the future.

Of course I kept my composure, but I was outraged. Those cocksuckers! They had deceived my friend, Tamara Baum, who had then led me astray. The first payphone I came to I rang up her number, wait till she heard about this. But strangely she wasn’t in when I called, and even more strangely she wasn’t in when I called from my sister’s house, and I think maybe I called once more before I figured out what was going on.

Blacks in Berlin - 1964-1967

I'll look up Hetty Green this weekend. I don't know anything about the history of the Gage Park neighborhood, I guess I just figured it had always been there. I'm not even sure if our house was in the Gage Park neighborhood, maybe we were in the Elsdon neighborhood. I have read that Elsdon used to be a separate town that grew up around the old railroad station that was located where all those tracks running parallel to Lawndale Avenue crossed 51st Street. It appeared that 51st used to intersect with Pulaski, but it had been blocked off some time previous, and 51st kind of petered out and became a side street west of Kedzie. It seemed almost rural out there, but it was actually industrial land that wasn't being used for much and had been overgrown with tall grass and weeds.  My buddy Jack and I and my two beagles used to chase rabbits all around there, but that's a whole nother story, which I'm sure I've told you before.

I thought I had also told you about my experiences with Blacks in Berlin, but maybe not. The army had been fully integrated long before I joined, I think Harry Truman did it shortly after World War II. It didn't bother me at the time, but some of the good old boys from the South weren't happy about it. They mumbled and grumbled amongst themselves, but I never saw them make a fuss in mixed company. I don't know what the percentage was during the six months I spent in training, but colored folks were pretty scarce in Berlin when I first got there. Rumor had it that was because Berlin was classified as a politically sensitive area and nobody who had any kind of police record was sent there. As Vietnam escalated, Berlin became less important on the world stage, and I suppose that restriction was lifted, if indeed it ever existed. For whatever reason, by the time I left, the Black population was approaching 50%.

Everybody got along pretty well at work but, now that I think about it, there wasn't much social mixing. They had their own bar downtown, actually it was a walled compound with a guard at the gate who wouldn't let any White males enter therein, but White females were more than welcome. I don't think anybody tried to keep the Blacks out of all the other bars but, for some reason, they seldom went to them. I never heard of any rules or laws dictating this stuff, I think it was just social custom. On post, there were two bars that were reserved for soldiers and their invited guests who had to be signed in at the gate. One was called the EM Club (enlisted men), and the other was the NCO Club (non-commissioned officers, which means sergeants). There must have also been an Officer's Club, but it wasn't in our compound. Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics mixed freely at these clubs, and nobody thought anything of it. I don't know why it was different downtown, it just was, and nobody questioned it.

In the early days, when the Black population was minimal, I'm guessing not over 10%, interracial friendships were not uncommon but, as the percentage went up, the Blacks started keeping to themselves more. I don't know why, nobody told them to do this, they just did it on their own. By the time I left, and the percentage was approaching 50%, tensions were starting to build. I heard later that, shortly after I went home, there was some kind of racial violence. I didn't get a lot of the details, at least I don't remember them if I did. I guess I got out of there just in time, like I got out of Chicago just in time. I didn't leave either place because of any racial issue, I didn't like it there for other reasons, which I'm sure I have already told you about.

Have a nice weekend.

Black Power

Oh that’s always the scene isn’t it, from the WW II movies, the Czech, the Italian, the Mexican, etc. Except no blacks, not at that time, maybe a little later, maybe by the Korean war.

I read a lot of books about Chicago, and early on the various ethnic groups did not mix, they had their own newspapers, their own churches, and their own turf. But Gage Park was a relatively new part of the city. The property had been owned by Hetty Green, The Witch of Wall Street. If you haven’t heard of her she is well worth looking up, and she didn’t sell it until sometime in the twenties and it all got built up real quickly and that is why it is so full of bungalows, the predominate style of the time. And probably why in our neighborhood the whites mixed so freely, everybody was moving into the neighborhood at the same time, so they dropped those ethnic things and were a real melting pot. I’ve heard it said, and I have noticed from what little experience that I have, that as you move west from east in the US, you get less and less racial prejudice.

But we didn’t quite abandon those ethnic things. I remember telling my mother the last names of my classmates, and she would say, oh she’s Irish, he’s Polish, she’s German, and I wondered how she did that. And we even remember these odd things, like I am half Czech, and a quarter German, and an eighth English, and an eighth French. What does it mean to be an eighth French? And if I had kids with somebody who had no French in her, our kids would be one sixteenth French, what would that mean.

Oh it’s all kind of a game, like astrology, if you don’t take it seriously it can be kind of fun. I used to consider myself German because of my last name. But then studying German in college they sounded kind of stupid and sentimental, so I decided that I would consider myself a Bohemian. If you have a hat, you can be a cowboy too.

I am thinking back to your army group, and as a good liberal, I was ready to point the finger of shame at you because there were no blacks in your group. But it’s not really like that.

Twenty years before a group of white guys would have had nothing to do with black guys. Probably there were some white guys who had nothing against black people, but I imagine they would go along with the majority of the other white guys just to get along. I think things got better, at least among northerners during the early days of the civil rights movement. Then came Black Power.

It was a shocking thing, that chant and those raised fists, what did it mean, they wouldn’t say. I’ll admit I have always been a bit afraid of black people, from the days of my mother telling me they all carried knives, to my hippie days, riding the Illinois Central up from Champaign and through that vast southside ghetto. Block after block after block, and all so shabby, I had to think that if I were a black person I would be pissed off.

The blacks really had no power at all until the civil rights movement, and even then they had to mostly rely on the kindness of certain white people, but then they finally got a little power, and said what the hell, why do we have to be begging, why don’t we just demand what we should have?

So they united, mostly the young people I think, and now all white people, crackers, liberals, middle-of-the-roaders, looked alike, and they didn’t want to have much to do with them, and even if they didn’t feel that strongly about it, they didn’t want their brothers and sisters to see them hanging with white people.

So that’s probably why there were no black guys in your group at Stephanie's. But it’s a bit of an odd thing that all those guys in the army, of different ethnicities were hanging together because of the army, the army that is there to fight the enemy, even if at that time you weren’t actually fighting, and it was a little unclear who the enemy was. And those young black people of the time were united because they were all against the white enemy.

A little overblown much of this, but it’s good to get pulses racing over the weekend.

"Is There No True American?"

That's pretty much the way I remember it too. I remember reading a newspaper feature story about block busting while I was still in school, but most of the other stuff happened after I was gone and I heard about it from my parents. They moved out to Palos Park just before I got out of the army, but it didn't have anything to do with racial issues. They had recently visited some close family friends who had moved there and were favorably impressed. Not long after that, a house just down the street from their friends came up for sale at a price they could afford. While they were still considering the move, and before they even put their house on 51st Street up for sale, they were approached by an agent from Central Steel and Wire who wanted to buy up the whole block and make a parking lot out of it.

My dad was still working at Lawndale Meat Products and, even though the commute increased from five miles to 15 miles, it took him the same time to drive to work, about a half hour. His old route had taken him down Kedzie, while his new route was down Manheim Road and some expressway, I think the Eisenhower. He and his partners agreed that it was only a matter of time till the Blacks would envelop the Lawndale neighborhood and they would have to close the store, but they hoped to keep it going until they were able to retire. It wasn't just that they didn't want to operate in a Black neighborhood, it was because all their customers, who were mostly Poles and Czechs, were either moving away or dying off. As it turned out, the Mexicans got there before the Blacks and kind of saved both the neighborhood and the store. One of the reasons the old Czechs and Poles shopped there was that all the butchers could speak their language, and now my father started to learn Spanish as well. My dad said that the Mexicans were good customers and good neighbors and he never had a problem with them. When they finally sold the store, it was losing money, but not because of the clientele, it was just that they couldn't compete with the big chain stores any longer. The buyers planned to close the retail part and just run the sausage factory.

When I was in the army, a bunch of us was sitting at a table in Steffanie's Bar in the British Sector. You may remember Steffanie's from my story "The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers". Since it wasn't Saturday night, there was no fight on the schedule, otherwise I wouldn't have been in the place myself. Anyway, these two young German girls came over and asked if they could sit with us. They didn't want to pick any of us up or any thing like that, they had been learning English in school and wanted to see if they could use it in the real world. They had conversed with British soldiers before, but we were the first Americans they had met. They were having a little trouble understanding one of the guys who had a bit of an accent, and he told them that he was Mexican. The girls were surprised because they had thought we were all Americans. We explained that we were indeed all Americans, but that particular guy was a Mexican-American. They asked about the rest of us and we went around the table telling them our ancestry. We had the Mexican, a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a Filipino, an Italian, a Brazilian, and me, the Czech. One of the girls looked puzzled and asked "Is there no true American?" Well, I said, I suppose the only true Americans are the Indians, but there are none of them here at the moment.

We had this sergeant in the mess hall, his name was "Ibarra", or "Iberra", something like that. The only English words I ever heard him say were "Howa you wanna you eggs?" I always thought he spoke Spanish, but apparently not. One day I was on KP and he was trying to tell me to do something and I wasn't getting it. As luck would have it, some the same guys I had been with at Steffannie's the other night were on KP too that day, so I asked if one of them could translate for us. Although they all spoke Spanish in one dialect or another, except for the Brazilian, none of them could understand the sergeant either. The consensus was that, whatever he was speaking, it certainly wasn't Spanish. I said that maybe it was Portuguese, which I imagined sounded something like Spanish, but the Brazilian guy, who spoke Portuguese, said it wasn't that. It didn't sound anything like Italian, French, German, or any of the Slavic languages either. We never did find out what nationality that guy was, and he was a sergeant in the U.S. Army!

West of western Part 2

We left Chicago in September of 1963, you for the army, me for college. I was still back for Christmas and Thanksgiving and summer vacations for the first couple years and so I was in touch with what was going on, but as the years went by less so. But I was always reading the Sun-Times.

I’m not sure if I was still living in Chicago when block busting reared its ugly head. This was where the real estate guys would find a black family willing to move into a white neighborhood and make sure all the neighbors knew that a black family was moving in, and they would all panic and move out so the realtors would buy the property cheap and sell it high to the black families moving in, and because the feds wouldn’t give mortgages to people living in mixed race areas, they’d have to sign contracts where if they were late on a single payment the realtor could take back the home and they would have nothing.

Some of the white neighbors were out and out racists who would never live next to black people, but most were not that extreme, but they just worried that their property values would go down, and the longer you waited, while the neighborhood was turning, the less you would get for it, so you better sell quick, and I guess those neighborhoods turned pretty fast. I think it happened mostly to the east and the south of my neighborhood, but I don’t think it ever happened around 55th and Kedzie, and probably there is not a black person living in the neighborhood to this day.

But it was a scare, people would look nervously at any black person passing through the neighborhood because why would they be passing through our neighborhood, unless they were thinking of buying a property. And then they would look nervously at their neighbors, were they selling to a black person, or did they know something about a black person moving in and weren’t saying anything because they wanted to sell before the panic began? People who were selling their houses had to go out of their way to tell their neighbors that they would only sell it to a white person. It wasn’t pretty.

There was some kind of plan where you would buy insurance and all this money would go into a pot, and if somebody was panicking after a black person moved in and selling their house cheaply, they would buy up the house to keep it out of the hands of block busting realtors, so that even if some (relatively rich) black people moved in the neighborhood would remain stable. I think some people saw this as a liberal way to integrate neighborhoods, and others saw it as a way to keep black people out of the neighborhood. I wish I had a better grip on the details. I try to look this stuff up, but a lot of it was just what people thought rather than what was really going on.

By 1966 I was a full fledged hippie and Martin Luther King was marching on Marquette and Gage Park. It was a pretty tense time. I remember walking by the American Nazi Party’s storefront on 63rd Street. I figured my parents were surely embarrassed about me being a hippie, but at least I wasn’t a fucking nazi. I still knew some of the guys I grew up with in the neighborhood and I remember them telling me that they had been throwing rocks at the marchers. They told me that in a way to make me think that they didn’t care that much about the issues, it was just a kind of party, but maybe they were soft-pedaling things, seeing that I was a full-fledged hippie.

After awhile I only came back for like Christmas or Thanksgiving and only stayed one or two days. I would catch the train or the Greyhound in Champaign and ride the Archer bus back to the old neighborhood and I never paid much attention to what was going on around there.

When I was still a pretty young, there was a kid up the block named Michael Mendoza, who was a Mexican, but we never thought much about that at the time, it was like being Irish or Italian or Greek. When I moved back from Texas in 1987, maybe ninety percent of the neighborhood was Mexican. Even though they didn’t all speak English there was never that animus against them that there has always been for blacks. And by this time the whites were getting old and dying and their kids were moving out of the neighborhood, and as far as I know there was never a fight about the Mexicans moving in.

There were just a few white people left, my mother, an Irish woman her age a few houses down, maybe a handful, all of them, all old. My mother got along with them well enough, she was old and they helped her out sometimes. But she didn’t like that they didn’t spoke Spanish to each other when my mother wanted to do all the talking. And she didn’t like their food, and their ways, and the way they looked, because they were different from her.

The Old Neighborhood

I don't remember the colored folks being as far as Western Ave. in those days, but I do remember that the neighborhood started changing about there. Like you said, it got shabbier as you went east, but I don't think it got really bad until you crossed Halsted.  Some of the kids at Gage Park High came from east of Western and, while none of them were colored, they were generally a different breed of cat. They were more into the hoodlum attitude, but I think it was mostly an act that was in fashion at the time, like the Hippie look that later displaced it. Of course there were the real Hippies like yourself, and then there were the copy cat wanabees that I have heard called "summer Hippies". I'm sure there were real hoodlums too, but most of the ones we dealt with were just walking the walk and talking the talk. Sometimes they did get a little too carried away, like the incident at Cornell Park, but I think most of it was just posturing.

Some of the residents of our own neighborhood must have lived further east at one time because they referred to it as "the old neighborhood", just as they called their grandparents' country of origin "the old country". I don't know if they moved west to escape the black tide that was washing over the city, or if their moving west created the vacancies that enabled it to get started. There were more rental properties east of Western, whereas our neighborhood was mostly owner occupied houses. I read once that Stony Island Ave. used to be pretty swanky in its day, maybe the late 19th or early 20th Century. I don't remember why it went downhill like that, but I suppose the people who lived there went somewhere else and were replaced by you-know-who. I remember it was generally believed that, when the colored folks moved in, the neighborhood went to hell. Looking back on it now, however, I wonder if it wasn't the other way around. As people's financial situations improved, they  moved to a "better" neighborhood, leaving their aging buildings behind to be occupied by the next wave of immigrants looking for a cheap place to rent.

If you remember my story "The Only Time We Were Robbed", you know my family's attitude about the colored folks. Looking back on it now, it might have been somewhat patronizing, but it was pretty tolerant and enlightened compared to the prevailing attitudes of the time. It was only after the riots of the 60s and 70s that my family started to become a bit "prejudiced", which is what they called bigotry in those days. Although I was long gone from Chicago by then, I was reading the same newspaper stories and starting to drift the same way as my parents. To their dying days, however, my parents believed, and I still believe, that you should relate to people as individuals rather than as members of some class or race. Nevertheless, you should be careful when you have to go into a "bad neighborhood" for some reason, and you shouldn't go there at all unless you have a compelling reason to do so. It is unlikely that the people who live there are as enlightened and tolerant as you and, even  if they are, they have no reason to believe that you are.

west of Western, Part 1

This is kind of a remembrance of the racial situation growing up as a white kid in Gage Park. I was thinking of your strange use of the term taking over, and I do remember that this was a phrase we used west of Western, referring to them, we were always afraid of them taking over. I was hoping to finish it up this morning, but now I see that I will need at least one more entry. Maybe you could give an account of your growing up in Gage Park, preferably with the way you felt then rather than with the way you feel now.

I used to go to Gage Park, the park, a bit, just to hang around, and for a little while I used to go to a chess club in the field house. But it was a bit like a frontier, you never went any further east, certainly not east of the viaduct, because that was where they lived. They being the black people. If you crossed under it, you could well be robbed, or maybe killed just because you were white, as could well happen to them if they crossed into our neighborhood. Just the way it was.

Before we discovered the swift modern Archer bus, we used to take the 55th street bus downtown. We would catch it at Kedzie and roll east to California and then a glimpse down the block to Gage Park High School, then the park, then across Western and under the viaduct into their neighborhood. At first it didn’t look that different, but the further east you got, the shabbier it became, and by Halsted it was pretty bad, and then you were turning east around State Street and going right through the ghetto. We didn’t call it the ghetto then, I don’t think it got that term until sometime in the sixties. Probably we just called it the nigger neighborhood.

And it was pretty bad. The buildings were all run down, and the lawns were just patches of dirt, and they had been getting on the bus since sometime past Western and now it was mostly them on the bus, so you better be careful. My mother had told me that they all carried knives and they would slice you up if you called any of them a nigger. I didn’t really believe that, but I was careful.

Some of the buildings looked like they had once been pretty fancy, and I knew that this had once been a white neighborhood, and now look at it. They had moved in, and they had run it down.

Just like what would happen if they moved into our neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of people who had formerly lived east and south of us, and everything had been just fine, like it was around Gage Park, and then they moved in. So it was best if we could stop them at the viaduct.

Outside of those bus trips and when we were downtown we never saw them. I don’t remember ever seeing them walking in our neighborhood, or even waiting at a bus stop. They knew that we wouldn’t like it.

When I was a teenager I used to play golf at Marquette Park. It had that golf course and a big lagoon where people could fish, and hills that were probably artificial and trees and all that stuff. Sometimes you’d get to talking to some people who lived nearby about what a pretty park it was, and sometimes their faces would darken and they’d look east and say, “We’re never going to let them have it.”

It's Not the Country, It's the People In It

Sometime during the 1990s I read an article in the paper that said the average family income, adjusted for inflation, in the U.S. had finally gotten back up to where it was 20 yeas previous, only now there were two people in the family working to make the same money that one person used to. Notice, I said average. Much has been made recently about the widening gap between the richest people in the country and the poorest people in the country. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm talking about the average income here. Truth be known, the government can't be totally blamed for all that, some of the blame must be assigned to big business and their eternal quest for cheap labor. On the other hand, it was the government that opened up trade relations with Red China and negotiated "free trade" agreements with other countries. If I didn't know any better, I would say that they're all in it together, but that would be just paranoid.

Some time ago, I came across an article on Wiki about the formation of Israel and Palestine. The year was 1948. The British mandate was about to expire, but they weren't sure to whom they should turn over the keys. The newly formed United Nations stepped in and brokered an agreement to divide the country between the two factions, but it wasn't a clean line right down the middle. I guess they were trying to give sections of the country to the people who were already living there, so they ended up with a gerrymandered patch work of territories, with the city of Jerusalem divided down the middle.  Israel agreed to the agreement, but the Palestinians did not, vowing to "drive Israel into the sea". While the U.N. was still dithering about it, Israel unilaterally proclaimed their independence at 12:01 AM of the day the British mandate expired. They claimed the land that the U.N. had offered them, but reserved the right to acquire more in the future if the fortunes of war turned in their favor. The Palestinians immediately attacked, the Israelis fought back, and did indeed expand their borders as a result. The Palestinians subsequently lost the rest of their territory in the Six Day War of 1967. The U.N. and some other bleeding hearts called on Israel to give the land back. I think they did eventually, except for Jerusalem, which they vowed to keep forever. Since then, the Palestinians have attacked Israel numerous times, and Israel has periodically occupied the "disputed territories", more or less temporarily. I don't know the current status of all of them, but I remember when Israel gave back the Gaza Strip a few years ago, and the Palestinians have been intermittently chucking rockets from there ever since. I understand that Israel has recently re-entered Gaza to put an end to this foolishness, but I don't know a lot of details about that.

I saw on the news today that it has been determined that the plane in the Ukraine was indeed shot down by a missile, and that the Russian separatists are the most likely suspects. Putin has promised to cooperate with the investigation, and the separatists have surrendered the two "black boxes", which are actually orange. (I think they are orange on all planes, and I have no idea why they call them "black boxes".)

I may have to re-think my assertions about "taking over". When I lived in Chicago, the news media was calling it "integration", but I never heard a person in real life call it that, they all referred to it as "taking over". For all I know, those terms may have fallen out of common usage, and I don't know what they are calling it nowadays. It sounds like what you have in your building is true integration, with only 10% Black. I seem to remember you telling me that the North Side has always been integrated, and I have no basis to dispute that since, back in my day, I never went to the North Side. I was told that there was nothing there that I needed to see, and besides, the streets are too narrow and there is no place to park. I also remember you telling me that White people only make up about 1/3 of the total population of Chicago, so it sounds like the city as a whole has indeed been taken over.

I think you're right, though, that race is not a good way to identify people. "Hispanic" is not really a race, it's a nationality, and "gay" is certainly not a race. I guess what I mean when I say "we" in this case is "my people". The problem with that is, truth be known, I don't have any people, I'm in a class all by myself. Maybe that's what I mean, regular people like me who do not identify themselves as a member of any race, class, or social group that thinks they're better than everybody else and entitled to special privileges because of who they are instead of what they do. By that criteria, I suppose television hasn't be really taken over either, it just seems that way. It may be more accurate to say that TV has been integrated, and I suppose I can live with that, as long as the channel selector and the off button still works.

taking over Chicago my ass

This big gov equals small incomes is something I am going to dismiss out of hand. It’s hard to define what’s a big gov and what’s a small gov and hard to describe big and small incomes and what does it mean if there are big incomes but only a few people get them? Sometimes a big gov has big incomes and sometimes it has small incomes, and sometimes a small gov has has big incomes and sometimes it has small incomes. Like many burning issues you can cherry pick and make your case either way, but overall there is no pattern.

But I am going to totally agree with you about democracies in the mideast. When W and his wrecking crew were heading into Iraq one of the things they threw at those who wanted us to stay out was the accusation that the noninterventionist liberals were saying ‘those’ people weren’t ready for democracy, and therefore they were racists. The conservatives love to toss the accusation of racism at the liberals.

But they’re not ready for it, and I agree with you that it’s not genetic but in their current culture. Those artificial borders are an old idea of empires. If you have all your, let’s call them cultures, in their own province, that will make it easier for the province to stand together and rebel, but if you put half in one and half in the other, then each of those provinces will have half one culture and half another, and both sides probably won’t like each other and it will be harder for them to unite and rebel. Some of those mideast borders were put in by the Ottomans for that reason. And probably the European powers weren’t thinking of that exactly, but when they cut up the pie it had the same effect.

I don’t know why they continue to respect those artificial boundaries. I think in most cases there is one group more powerful than the others and they don’t want to give up an inch of their land, even though it is only their land because some old white guys in Europe decided to make it so a hundred years ago. People are funny that way.

I think the UN originally did make Israel and Palestine one country at first, but then the two had a war and then there were two countries, and then they had another war and there was just Israel. More complicated than that of course and it seems like each side cherry picks their facts as to who rightfully owns the land. The whole situation seems hopeless to me. Kerry is going over there but I won’t.

Right now the bodies are headed to Amsterdam and the flight boxes are going somewhere responsible, and everybody knows with 99 percent surety that the pro Russian Ukraines, with the help of the Russians are responsible. I don’t know why the pro Russian guys fucked with the bodies and the flight boxes. What did they expect to get away with? If everybody thinks you are guilty, one thing you don’t want to do is look guilty, and that’s just what they did. One thing you do want to do if you are guilty, is complicate things and they seem to be doing that pretty well. I think in the end Putin is going to say Russia has no involvement and you can like it or you can lump it, and how are we going to lump it?

One thing that might happen is that the only thing that is keeping Russia afloat is its oil revenues, and Europe is getting increasingly fed up with Russia and looking for somewhere else to buy its oil, so maybe in the long run it will hurt Putin.

You have a peculiar definition of ‘taking over.’ Normally it would mean something like the Russian army marching into Ukraine, or maybe the Shias taking over the government in Iraq. I don’t see where the blacks and gays have taken over Chicago. The blacks still live in the worst houses, and the gays live well enough, but they have yet to make me marry my gay dog. I think what you mean by taking over is getting exposure on the media and saying things that affront Beagles.

It sounds like you don’t like this country, so maybe you ought to go further north into Canada.

Big Bucks and Other Stuff

There are those of us who believe that the fact that we don't have an oppressive government (relatively speaking) is the reason why it's possible to earn big bucks in this country, or used to be. In our lifetimes (yours and mine) we have seen the power of government increase as the opportunity for making big bucks decreased for the average guy. Of course correlation does not prove cause and effect, but it kind of makes you wonder. Even though our country has lost ground in our lifetimes, it's apparently still way ahead of whoever is in second place, which is why immigrants continue to flock to our shores. Most of them probably don't make the connection between big government and small paychecks, and many of our own people don't either.

They have always had oppressive governments in the Middle East (relatively speaking). Trying to teach those people about democracy is like trying to teach a bull to dance, it doesn't work and it just aggravates the bull. Lest you accuse me of racism, let me qualify that. It's not that those people are genetically incapable of understanding democracy, it's just that it's not in their cultural heritage so they have no historical frame of reference. Another problem is that the former colonial powers established arbitrary borders that didn't take tribal rivalries into account. Those tribal rivalries are probably one reason the colonial powers were able to take over the region in the first place. Upon gaining independence, you'd think they would have just trashed the borders and started all over again, and maybe we should get out of the way and let them do it.

Speaking of arbitrary borders, I think that's a big reason why Israel and the Palestinians are still going at it. I believe those borders were established by your precious United Nations, although they have been modified over the years by periodic warfare. What those people need is two separate and distinct countries that are located out of mortar and rocket range of each other.

Has it been established that the plane in the Ukraine was actually shot down by the pro-Russian separatists? Last I heard they were denying it.

I'm sure I told you about our local Indians before. Briefly, back in the 1980s, a series of court decisions and out-of-court settlements granted certain special privileges to Native American Indians in Michigan. This inspired a number of people, who previously had not known that they were Indians, to trace their ancestry and discover that they were indeed Indians. (If you're 1/8 Indian, you're an Indian, the other 7/8 doesn't count.) Most of them had French last names, which is not surprising since the French, who have been in the area since the 17th Century, were a lot friendlier with the Indians than the English, who came later.

I got a little carried away with my rant about the gays and colored people taking over the country. Truth be known, they have only taken over sports, television, the big cities, and the federal government. None of this has had a serious material impact on my neighborhood, unless you count Indians as colored people, which is a bit of a stretch because most of them don't look any different than anybody else. If they ever do get his far, I would be moving north rather than south but, with any kind of luck, I'll be dead by then.

world affairs

I agree with you on the reason people immigrate to here, it’s not our freedom they desire, but our stuff. I suppose it is better not to have a repressive government, but I think mostly people want to be able to earn big bucks and buy big things.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if Iraq had any kind of underground movement before we invaded it. Well I’m sure that they had some fundamentalists and some commie types, but I’m guessing the Shias had their own fundamentalists and commies, and the Sunnis theirs and the Kurds their own, so there were no nationwide underground organizations.

I wonder about the Syrians. From here it looked like what happened at first was freedom loving guys took up their guns against that awful Assad, and actually it looked for a bit like they might just pull it off, but then Assad brought in Hezbollah and then the freedom loving guys found those ISIS guys fighting alongside them, and outfighting them, and more interested in establishing the caliphate than a free Syria, and now it looks like it is basically Sunni vs Shia and now everybody is involved, and probably the people of Syria would have been better off had those freedom loving guys never took up their guns.

Back to Iraq, since we didn’t really want to stick around we installed, or helped install, a variety of guys, and now we have this Malaki who we want to dump, although how we do that when we only have token forces there is beyond me. And we will be glad to see Karzai gone in Afghanistan, but we will probably not like whoever takes his place. Well that’s the problem, there are no good guys to pick. We have to pick somebody who is acceptable to their people, and mostly their people hate us because our army is there, so we end up putting in some guy who doesn’t like us either.

And then in Israel, three Jews get assassinated (strange that we still don’t know exactly who did that) and the next thing you know the Transformers are let loose on Gaza, and the idiots at Hamas are pumping their popgun missiles into Israel. And neither side wants to stop unless the other side does first, and it looks like Israel will kill a bunch of Gazans, and finally pull out once they think they have weakened Hamas enough, but all the relatives of all the people they killed will be radicalized and so maybe ten years down the road the same thing will be happening again.

Oh but Ukraine, that’s what had me going on about the UN. It looks pretty sure that pro-Russian Ukrainians were armed by Russia with this Buk missile thing, which is a terribly irresponsible thing to do, and if Putin were a decent guy he would do something to atone for it, but he’s not a decent guy so who knows, maybe nothing will happen.

I wanted the UN to be stronger because maybe we could live with a little more repression if it would keep airplanes in the sky, and whatever collateral damages these wars cause down a bit. But we can’t actually know that it will, and who knows how repressive the UN would become if we gave it actual power. Back in my hippie days I was sort of for the commies taking over other countries, but not the US because I didn’t want to live by all those rules.

Of course I move in different circles now than in my bungalow belt days at Gage Park, but I have to say that racial attitudes are much more tolerant than they were back in the day when they were throwing rocks at Martin Luther King in Marquette Park. It’s not just Chicago of course, it’s everywhere, and that’s good. When I was subbing I saw almost no friction between the races in the student body and the faculty also.

What happened with the Indians up there? You know the French comingled quite a bit with the Indians way back so that everybody hanging around the trading posts were part French and part Indian and some had French names and some had Indian names. So I imagine those Frenchmen who found out that they were Indians were also part French. This whole thing about what race you are is mostly bullshit. I think we have discussed this before.

So what’s this about how it is not our country anymore? As the old joke goes, what do you mean we Kimosabe? Who are the we you are talking about? Straight white people I assume. Although a hundred fifty years ago, you would have been off-white, and part of the they who were moving in and taking the country over. There’s maybe five or ten percent black people living in Marina City, and I am sure there are many married gay people, but I don’t feel at all taken over. And I’ll wager if the gays moved in north of you and the blacks south of you and the Mexicans in the west and some Islamic folk to the east, you would not be moving either.

So there.

My Sister the Liberal

I'm sure that my sister picked up her liberalism in college. I remember her saying, "In elementary school they taught us that American was always right. In High school they taught us that America was sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In college they taught us that America was always wrong." I never regretted not going to college, and that's one of the reasons why. I have mellowed out over the years, mostly because of the internet but, judging from her Face Book posts, I don't think that my sister has.

Now that you mention it, I think I do remember that hammer murder, but I don't remember any of the details. I doubt that the Cornell Park thing ever made the national news, but it was big news in our neighborhood for awhile. I don't think there were any guns involved, just knives and the usual assortment of home made weapons.

Of course I'm no fan of the United Nations, or any other kind of global government. A global government would likely be staffed by the same people who are now running the various national governments, only they would have more power. How would that be an improvement?

Of course there is a racial component to the immigration issue, but I think it goes both ways, they don't like us any more than we like them. They're not coming here because they like us, they just want our money which, when you think about it, is the same reason our own ancestors came here. All those Irish immigrants that came over in the 19th Century didn't come here for political reasons, they were refugees from the Great Potato Famine. People resented them at least as much as they resent the Mexican immigrants today, and the Irish are White people. It might be all lovey dovey in your upscale North Side culture, but I'm sure you know that it's not like that in some of the other Chicago neighborhoods. I don't think the people around Cheboygan have anything against Hispanics, mainly because there aren't any Hispanics around here. The few Blacks we have seem to be well assimilated and nobody pays them any mind. Many of the Whites who moved here in the 60s and 70s were refugees from Detroit, and there was some concern that the Blacks might follow them here in droves and try to take over, but that never materialized, and you seldom hear people trashing the Blacks anymore. If we had any Islamic people here, they wouldn't be very popular, but we don't, so it's not an issue. There was that thing with the Indians back in the 80s, but everybody seems to have gotten over that by now, at last partly because a lot of people around here found out that they were Indians when they had always thought they were Frenchmen.

This thing with Mexico has been going on for a long time, maybe ever since the Mexican-American War. That's why I thought it might be solved if we gave them their land back. Silly me! It's never that simple, is it? This thing with the children puts a new twist on things. If we turn them away, we're a bunch of mean pricks because they're poor helpless children. If we accept them, they will just keep sending more of them and overwhelm the system. Eventually, there will be pressure to accept their families as well, because who can deny that children belong with their families? That's why I became interested in the idea of annexing the whole territory and making them all instant Americans, which is what happened after the Mexican-American War. You're probably right, though, it will never pass.

Maybe you're right that there is really no solution to this one. We can't keep them out, and we can't send them back, it's too late for that. Maybe what we need to do is just surrender the country and all move to Mexico ourselves. It's not really our country anymore anyway, it's been pretty well taken over by gays and colored people. With Mexico abandoned, we could go there and make a fresh start in the wilderness, just like Daniel Boone and Davey Crocket. Only let's try to do it right this time, okay?

it all began with davy crockett

I wouldn’t say that Rebel was full of crazy people, or not any crazier then in any other movie, it was just awkward and things didn’t seem to fit together. The oddest thing was that most of the teenagers were played by people in their mid twenties or older. I think we’ve discussed movies before, but I don’t remember what we said.

Oh of course you have a sister, what was I thinking? It’s just that you sound like an only child, but maybe the oldest son is close. So why is she so liberal?

Oh Davy Crockett, I thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, of course I had not been around that long. I had coonskin caps, and those albums, and the trading cards, and I watched all of the spinoffs on Disney. I maybe had three different 45s of the song because I was a kid and kept breaking them. I remember later Disney tried to do the same thing with Daniel Boone, but it never took off. Daniel Boone was someone we had heard about in school, so already he was boring, he was like your father’s Oldsmobile.

And he was more of a pioneer and pioneers were boring. They showed us all those scratchy movies about pioneers churning butter and making soap, and I’m all like doncha have anything where a guy’s sleeve catches on the door handle and he ends up going over the cliff?

But anyway some people think that whole Davy Crockett phenomenon was partly responsible for the sixties. Suddenly they were selling all this merchandise to kids, and by using that new fangled tv they could run commercials and appeal to them to buy more, and they followed, or promoted, or invented that whole youth culture thing which made us feel like we were somebody important and not just a bunch of kids waiting around to grow up. And then you add to that drugs, and the unpopular war, and the fact that there were so dang many of us, and boom.

Do you remember the time they killed that black guy at 59th and Kedzie with a hammer? I remember that was a big deal, but it was before I really started reading newspapers so everything I knew about it, I heard from someone else. But I googled around for it a year or two ago ‘fifty ninth and kedzie racial attack,’ and came across the story. It seems like that was the work of the Rebels also. Hum, googled ‘chicago cornell park shooting,’ and came up with nothing.

Maybe that’s the way the world is, just a bunch of countries, each one wanting to go their own way, and always fighting each other, and no police to go to to settle their hashes. What if we had a really strong UN? Sure we would give up some of our freedoms, but we already have, to the countries we belong to, but like I said people would always rather be oppressed by their own kind than by a bunch of strangers. I am thinking of the shooting down of that plane over Ukraine is kind of like innocent bystanders who get killed when some stoopid kid is shooting at a corner where some guys are wearing the wrong colored hats. We have gone so far beyond zip guns that maybe we need some blue helmeted guys to bust our heads.

It seems to me that most of this hatred over immigration is white people being pissed off about brown people getting into the country. It’s people who don’t like anybody who isn’t like them, and they get whipped up into a fury and it’s mostly to harvest their votes, because we ain’t shipping them back and there is no fence high enough to keep them out. In the cities where people are jammed together there are more incidents than in the country, but there are more people. If you examine tolerance, there is much more tolerance in the cities than in emptier spaces.

Isn’t one of our national principles the equality of all men, so maybe we ought to take people who don’t feel like that and ship them out of the country, maybe on a jet plane to Ukraine. I know that’s extreme, but I am trying to provoke for over the weekend. I agree that there are concerns about people coming willy nilly into the country, but I believe a lot of this anti immigration stuff is really racism (didn’t you want to deport anybody who even had a Mexican sounding name?), pretending to be concerned with something more abstract and antiseptic.

As for central America. A lot of them are coming here, but more are staying. And they don’t want us, and we don’t want them.

From Rebels to Immigrants

I don't remember ever sitting through the whole movie "Rebel Without a Cause", I just remember that one scene where those guys were driving their cars off a cliff. I was passing by the TV on my way to someplace else when my parents were watching it, and they said I should watch it too because it was a classic. I sat down and watched those guys driving their cars off that cliff, and then I said, "This is a movie about crazy people." and continued on my way to wherever it was I had been heading. We had recently watched another old classic about crazy people, "The Snake Pit", and I was in no mood for another one like that at the moment.

I was not an only child except for the first three and a half years of my life. Remember my sister Sue? Don't feel bad, I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age.

I remember watching "The Hit Parade" on TV and liking it. My favorite time was when "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" was number one for a long stretch. I don't remember exactly how long, but it broke every record in the book. I always liked classical and folk music, and never developed an interest in the popular teen aged stuff.

We were pretty young when the Cornell Park thing went down, and the kids involved were all much older. All I know is that there was a friendly neighborhood rumble that got out of control and somebody got killed. The first I heard of it was at school, where kids were discussing it in hushed tones with a touch of reverence in their voices. The reason I remember Champy Reese was that his name was bandied about more than any of the others. I never met the guy myself, but a lot of the other kids at Sawyer seemed to know him. I later heard from my parents about the kid from Elsdon who was involved. Funny that I don't remember his name because I knew him from church. I want to say that he was a Vondrak because that family was known as a pillar of the church, but I'm not sure about that. If he wasn't a Vondrak, then he was from some other highly respected family like that. Like I said, people were shocked about it. His story was that a bunch of kids were riding around with him in a car that he was driving. The other kids told him to drop them off near, but out of sight of, the park. They didn't tell him what they were planning, but said they would be back shortly. When they came back, they jumped into the car and told him to "Drive!" and he drove.

I think you're right when you say that we've got gangs in our genes. That's what Medieval  feudalism was all about, you know. We tend to glamorize it with all those knights in shinning armor, but it was basically just gang warfare. "West Side Story" was based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, and I think what they were trying to say was that people have not changed all that much since those days. I read somewhere that gangs tend to form whenever police protection is non existent or ineffective. It's like you said, people don't have anybody else to protect them so they feel like they have to protect themselves. I understand that's how the original Mafia got started in Sicily. Like the urban gangs of today, they later evolved into a business enterprise when they found out they could make money selling things that people couldn't buy elsewhere.

Bullying is one kind of social crap, but not all social crap is bullying. The guys I knew in the army and the paper mill weren't all that mean to each other, they just talked tough as kind of a social bonding ritual. What used to depress me about it was it seemed like some of them didn't know any other way to relate to people. When you do anything long enough, and everybody else around you does it too, it eventually becomes the new normal. I think I told you before that, in the army, we used to joke about being afraid that we would go home some day, sit down at the family dinner table, and casually say, "Pass the fucking salt!"

I know that America was built by immigrants, and that it's supposed to be "the melting pot", and I don't have a problem with that. It just seems that there is a lot more hatred being expressed today than there used to be. One reason for that might be that people are jammed together with other people that they would rather not be around. If we could spread them all out and give each one his own domain, maybe they wouldn't be so cranky with each other. I thought that the proposal to annex Central America was an innovative approach. Since these people seem to want to live in the United States, let's bring the United States to them. They wouldn't have to sneak into the country if they were already here, and they wouldn't be outsiders anymore, they would be Americans. Of course, it would have to be voluntary, they'd have to vote on it and, who knows, they might go for it. Getting our own people to accept it might be a tougher sell. I read on Wiki that Haiti has asked us to annex them at least once, and our congress turned them down. Anyway, I don't see the harm in just talking about it. Like I said in the beginning, it may be impractical and impossible, but that's never stopped us before.

no room for Bohunks

Have you seen Rebel without a Cause lately? What an odd movie. It seems like they are blaming James's problems on his father being henpecked. Just a lot of stuff that doesn’t hang together, though that chicken thing with the guys with their combs (remember combs? You always carried around your comb) in their mouths still stands up. Then squinty James Dean got killed on the highway and became an idol. One thing you missed, being an only child, was having sisters who followed all the teenage idols.

I wonder if you always liked folk music. The first music I remember is that Hit Parade music which was mostly the music of our parents, then there was Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and then there was this awful era when it was all these carefully groomed handsome young guys with enormous pompadours singing syrupy love ballads, then the Beatles blew it all up, and then there was psychedelia, and then, well stuff I don’t really remember because I was past twenty five and not that keen on the latest hit.

I don’t remember any Cornell Park incident, had to look up the place on Google. My group didn’t go east of Western, or more than a couple blocks north of 55th, maybe west as far as the airport, but there was nothing west of the tracks, and south as far as Marquette Park. 63rd and Kedzie seemed to be the hot spot with three dimestores and a movie theater, and I seem to remember a lot of neon signs, to me it was the Las Vegas of the southwest side.

You know those primitive tribes, those hunter gatherers, typically what the teenagers do is gather in a warrior tribe and go raid other tribes, so I think that gangs are in our genes. It used to be how we chose our leaders, the bravest warriors, and got our women without inbreeding, but I am kind of pulling that last item out of my ass.

Oh I doubt if any of those hothead teens who shoot up the place have any kind of license, but they got the guns through licensed guys who bought them legally. But there we go again.

Is bullying what you mean by social crap? Well who isn’t against bullying, though it seems of late that we have made a fetish of it. It does seem to have a social use though. When you have a group and a couple of them discover that they both don’t like a third, it brings them closer together, and then others join in to be in with the in crowd, and then it gets to a state that even guys who like the victim don’t dare stand up for him, lest they go into the barrel too. Not a pretty thing I admit.

That verbal stuff is strong. One of the worst problems I had keeping order in the classroom is that one kid would say something about another, and that kid would react, and then there goes that whole lesson in single digit addition. I would take the kid aside, don’t pay attention to what others say, sticks and stones and all that rot, but the kid would just shake his head like I didn’t know what I was talking about. And thinking about it now, I guess I didn’t, because if the kid let one kid pick on him and he didn’t say anything, then another would join in, then another.

The way we climbed out of our hunter gatherer days is that we have institutions, like the police, where if somebody punches you, you don’t have to punch him back, you can go to the police, but as you get poorer and poorer, the institutions fade away until if you don’t protect yourself, nobody else will.

I just don’t see what there is to say about this latest set of ideas you have about kicking people out of their houses and making them go back to someplace they came from before, especially since I don’t see you volunteering to be kicked out. It’s wildly impractical and morally reprehensible. I don’t know when your people came over, but if it was like mine, sometime after the civil war, there were a lot of people then saying that we were all out of room for a bunch of stoopid Bohunks.