Photograph provided by the White HousePresident Bush tried Monday to make himself out to be just an ordinary guy, taking a swipe at himself and the bumbling way in which he speaks.
He used an appearance before the Union League Club to compare his speaking style to the eloquence of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
“When people think of Churchill, of course they marvel at what he managed to do with the English language,” Bush said. “When people think of me, never mind.”
If ever there was a place where Bush could get away with mocking his bumbling syntax, it is Chicago. The Second City is one of the few places where we don’t hold his speech too harshly against him, largely because our own politicos often can’t speak a coherent sentence.
Take our current mayor.
Richard M.
Daley’s “Chicagoese” can slip into “dems” and “dose,” when he’s not careful. He also has a tendency to speak in a blunt, almost earthy, manner.
This is the man who once said “if there was a rat in your sandwich you’d want to know,” when talking about a city crackdown on unsanitary restaurants, and “I’m pro-Death. Let’s get on with it,” when talking about the need to proceed with the 1990 execution of convicted killer Charles Walker.
Chicago is also the place where Daley’s father, the immortal Richard J. Daley, held sway for 21 years with so many verbal gaffes that his long-time press secretary, Earl Bush, came up with his own immortal quotable line.
“Don’t write what (Daley) says, write what he means,” Earl Bush used to plead with reporter-types who worked at City Hall.
Daley the first also was the man who came up with a defense, of sorts, of the Chicago Police Department in the wake of their conduct in trying to subdue protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, conduct that was later labeled by the Walker Commission as, “a police riot.”
“Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all,” Daley urged. “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
One year later, Daley the elder’s words were collected into a book entitled, “Quotations from Mayor Daley,” which was a little green book put together as a parody of the “Little Red Book” that contained the sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong and used to be cited as gospel by the Chinese Communists.
By comparison, the Ivy League-educated Bush is downright eloquent, even when he’s making up new words such as “strategery,” and during moments such as in 2005 in Brussels when he’s engaging in such babble as, “this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.”
Whenever I wonder just how people across the United States can take Bush’s babbling seriously, all I have to do is think of the Daleys.
The elder Daley is Chicago’s longest-running mayor, although his son could surpass him if he manages to survive another two years on the job without having a political meltdown. While both men have their detractors, a majority of Chicagoans think fondly of the Daleys and secretly hope there’s a third-generation Daley who can run for mayor sometime about the year 2023.
Mike Royko, the late famed Chicago newspaper columnist, said the elder Daley’s malaprops were part of his appeal. In a column published in the now-defunct Chicago Daily News on the day after “hizzoner’s” death in 1976, Royko wrote, “maybe it’s because so many of us aren’t that far removed from parents and grandparents who knew only bits and pieces of the language.
“So when Daley slid sideways into a sentence, or didn’t exit from the same paragraph he entered, it amused us. But it didn’t sound that different from the way most of us talk,” Royko wrote. “He found a way. We understood it. What more can one ask of the language?”
Times change. Chicago’s residents are not as blue collar as we’d like to think we are.
The decades have seen many of our one-time working class families move up the economic ladder. My grandfathers worked in steel mills on the South Side. No one in my family comes close to doing anything that physically intense for a living, and my family is far from unique.
But that doesn’t stop Chicagoans from pretending that we still are working class people, particularly when we are watching the Chicago Bears play football and we still bring out former Coach Mike Ditka’s assertion that Bears fans are a bunch of people named “Grabowski,” compared to other teams who are cheered for by people named “Smith.”
Being willing to put up with a verbal gaffe or two is part of that illusion.
So Bush can get away with his malaprops when visiting the Second City, particularly when he’s addressing a business group such as the Union League, which consists of business executives and other types who are among the roughly one-third of the American people who still view Bush favorably.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we’d actually vote for Bush come Election Day.
This is still Chicago, which solidly backed Al Gore and John Kerry when they challenged Bush for president and provided so many Democrat votes that Illinois solidly in the Democratic Party column, even though much of the rest of Illinois prefers Republicans.
Even if those of us upwardly mobile Chicagoans considered voting Republican, we might very well get outvoted by the ghosts of our blue collar grandparents.
To listen to Chicago conspiracy theorists, our grandparents are probably still on the voter rolls – casting ballots for the Democratic “Machine” from beyond the grave.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTE: An account of George W. Bush’s attempt at a self-deprecating crack about his awkward speaking style can be found here. http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/01/07/bush_pokes_fun_at_his_use_of_english/8766/
A recollection of some of Bush’s past verbal gaffes can be found here. http://www.slate.com/id/76886/
He used an appearance before the Union League Club to compare his speaking style to the eloquence of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
“When people think of Churchill, of course they marvel at what he managed to do with the English language,” Bush said. “When people think of me, never mind.”
If ever there was a place where Bush could get away with mocking his bumbling syntax, it is Chicago. The Second City is one of the few places where we don’t hold his speech too harshly against him, largely because our own politicos often can’t speak a coherent sentence.
Take our current mayor.
Richard M.
Daley’s “Chicagoese” can slip into “dems” and “dose,” when he’s not careful. He also has a tendency to speak in a blunt, almost earthy, manner.This is the man who once said “if there was a rat in your sandwich you’d want to know,” when talking about a city crackdown on unsanitary restaurants, and “I’m pro-Death. Let’s get on with it,” when talking about the need to proceed with the 1990 execution of convicted killer Charles Walker.
Chicago is also the place where Daley’s father, the immortal Richard J. Daley, held sway for 21 years with so many verbal gaffes that his long-time press secretary, Earl Bush, came up with his own immortal quotable line.
“Don’t write what (Daley) says, write what he means,” Earl Bush used to plead with reporter-types who worked at City Hall.
Daley the first also was the man who came up with a defense, of sorts, of the Chicago Police Department in the wake of their conduct in trying to subdue protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, conduct that was later labeled by the Walker Commission as, “a police riot.”
“Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all,” Daley urged. “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
One year later, Daley the elder’s words were collected into a book entitled, “Quotations from Mayor Daley,” which was a little green book put together as a parody of the “Little Red Book” that contained the sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong and used to be cited as gospel by the Chinese Communists.
By comparison, the Ivy League-educated Bush is downright eloquent, even when he’s making up new words such as “strategery,” and during moments such as in 2005 in Brussels when he’s engaging in such babble as, “this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.”
Whenever I wonder just how people across the United States can take Bush’s babbling seriously, all I have to do is think of the Daleys.
The elder Daley is Chicago’s longest-running mayor, although his son could surpass him if he manages to survive another two years on the job without having a political meltdown. While both men have their detractors, a majority of Chicagoans think fondly of the Daleys and secretly hope there’s a third-generation Daley who can run for mayor sometime about the year 2023.
Mike Royko, the late famed Chicago newspaper columnist, said the elder Daley’s malaprops were part of his appeal. In a column published in the now-defunct Chicago Daily News on the day after “hizzoner’s” death in 1976, Royko wrote, “maybe it’s because so many of us aren’t that far removed from parents and grandparents who knew only bits and pieces of the language.
“So when Daley slid sideways into a sentence, or didn’t exit from the same paragraph he entered, it amused us. But it didn’t sound that different from the way most of us talk,” Royko wrote. “He found a way. We understood it. What more can one ask of the language?”
Times change. Chicago’s residents are not as blue collar as we’d like to think we are.
The decades have seen many of our one-time working class families move up the economic ladder. My grandfathers worked in steel mills on the South Side. No one in my family comes close to doing anything that physically intense for a living, and my family is far from unique.
But that doesn’t stop Chicagoans from pretending that we still are working class people, particularly when we are watching the Chicago Bears play football and we still bring out former Coach Mike Ditka’s assertion that Bears fans are a bunch of people named “Grabowski,” compared to other teams who are cheered for by people named “Smith.”
Being willing to put up with a verbal gaffe or two is part of that illusion.
So Bush can get away with his malaprops when visiting the Second City, particularly when he’s addressing a business group such as the Union League, which consists of business executives and other types who are among the roughly one-third of the American people who still view Bush favorably.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we’d actually vote for Bush come Election Day.
This is still Chicago, which solidly backed Al Gore and John Kerry when they challenged Bush for president and provided so many Democrat votes that Illinois solidly in the Democratic Party column, even though much of the rest of Illinois prefers Republicans.
Even if those of us upwardly mobile Chicagoans considered voting Republican, we might very well get outvoted by the ghosts of our blue collar grandparents.
To listen to Chicago conspiracy theorists, our grandparents are probably still on the voter rolls – casting ballots for the Democratic “Machine” from beyond the grave.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTE: An account of George W. Bush’s attempt at a self-deprecating crack about his awkward speaking style can be found here. http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/01/07/bush_pokes_fun_at_his_use_of_english/8766/
A recollection of some of Bush’s past verbal gaffes can be found here. http://www.slate.com/id/76886/
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