Are we overreacting? Or do we really need to quit living with past hostilities?

There’s a site on Facebook I enjoy checking out from time to time called Original Chicago. Basically, it’s a place where long-time city residents (and others who no longer live here) can reminisce about the way things used to be.

The Maxwell Street of old, as memorialized in this pre-World War II postcard. Image provided by Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia

Favorite roller rink? Is the novel, “The Devil in the White City” (set during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892) accurate? Things like that.

BUT THINGS GOT a little more serious Thursday when the site’s administrator felt the need to post a critical note about people who referred to the old Maxwell Street district as “Jew Town.”

It’s a sign of “racial disrespect” that “will not be tolerated” at the site, the administrator wrote.

Which is an attitude I can respect because I often think it cowardly for website operators who refuse to control the content of their own sites – trying to claim that letting people randomly post their often stupid and ridiculous comments encourages free expression of thought.

Actually, it just encourages the idiots of our society to engage in bullying behavior. My own thought to people who want to make such rants is they ought to create their own sites (I’ll gladly offer them technical advice on how to do so). Although I suspect what they really want to do is undermine other peoples’ activity online.

BUT BACK TO “Jew Town,” which triggered an extensive series of responses from people who want to think the phrase has significant historic character to Chicago. Of course, most of them will go on to tell tales of all the stolen goods that wound up being resold there.

How dare we want to think it is wrong to use the phrase to describe a part of Chicago that once upon a time contained a heavy presence of people who were Jewish in religion and were the operators of the original businesses that existed in the area (which now is an upscale area by the University of Illinois at Chicago campus).

Some people literally are claiming that “Jew Town” is no different than “China Town” or any of the nicknames given in the past to enclaves of Polish immigrants (don’t forget Chicago used to brag there were more Poles, not Polacks, living here than in any city on Earth except Warsaw – the capital of Poland).

I don’t doubt that people in the past used “Jew” freely when referring to Jewish people, the same way that “Jap” used to be openly used when referring to Japanese.

THE LATTER ALSO is a slur that was meant to make those from the Asian island nation sound less than human – which I’m sure seemed right to those who came of age during the Second World War and wanted to forevermore think that Japanese people were worthy of derision.

But just as now we think it ridiculous whenever some old coot complains that we need to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” because they’re not willing to let go a war our government ended many decades ago (and rebuilt Japan in our own capitalist image), somehow, the idea of somebody thinking that “Jew Town” isn’t absurd is the real ridiculous notion.

The notion is that we need to let go our old obsessions and terminology that we used to justify them. It’s called advancing as a society. Even though some are going to complain it’s “political correctness run amok.”

The latter concept always struck me as being the thought process of old bigots who don’t want to be called out for the stupidity of their thoughts.

Is Chinatown similar to Maxwell Street in history, meaning?

SERIOUSLY, WHEN WAS the last time you ever heard anybody call a police squadrol a “Paddy wagon?” Even though I can recall that once was a commonly accepted term for the vehicle used to haul large loads of arrestees (a batch of drunken Irish?) from a crime scene – or take corpses to the morgue.

It’s time for some people to get with the program. Jewish people are “Jewish,” and “Jew” is only used by people who feel the need to think derogatory thoughts. Consider the dictionaries that give an alternate definition for “Jew” as “someone tight with their money or not very generous.”

Who still uses the old slur?

That certainly doesn’t sound like somebody trying to think seriously about an issue. It sounds like pure religious-motivated bile to me, which ought to be further reason to dump “Jew Town” from our city’s lingo. It’s embarrassing to our civic memory, and it’s not like people using the term now are trying to illustrate how absurd we used to be.

Better to get back to debates such as the man who asked Original Chicago readers what to do about the girlfriend who persists in putting ketchup on her hot dogs. Largely because I don’t put ketchup on anything, I say, “Dump her!”

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Did Belushi/Ackroyd give Chicago history lesson w/ The Blues Brothers?

I’m honest enough to realize that “The Blues Brothers” isn’t classic cinema.

It came out the summer following by first year of high school – a time in life when I had the time to watch the many movies that were made. The film based off the Belushi/Ackroyd “Saturday Night Live” characters was long (and would have been longer if director John Landis had had his original vision approved), over-convoluted and in some points nonsensical.

BUT THERE IS one reason why I will never tune away from a showing of the film if I happen to stumble across it – the film depicts a segment of Chicago that just doesn’t exist any longer and never got much attention paid to it when it was around (unlike “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” which shows us the official take on touristy Chicago).

As someone who was born in the South Chicago neighborhood and who was raised in suburban Calumet City, The Blues Brothers was the film that was made in my home neighborhoods (although to be honest, there never was a Our Lady of the Blessed Shroud orphanage in Cal City that needed saving).

In fact, the closest to Calumet City that the film came was when they used the remains of the old Dixie Square shopping mall in Harvey (two towns to the west) for the chase scenes involving the Illinois State Police.

But the 95^th Street bridge, the Baptist church that served as the “Triple Rock Church” and home of the Rev. Cleophus James (a.k.a., singer James Brown) and the “Curl Up and Dye” hair salon where the late Carrie Fisher’s vengeful hair stylist plotted the Belushi character’s death.

ALL ARE PLACES I could take you to in the old neighborhood and show you where movies were made nearly four decades ago.

Even outside of the city’s 10^th Ward, the film gives us the sight of what was once the old Maxwell Street market where one could easily repurchase any item that might have been ripped off from you.

Or that flophouse of a residency where Ackroyd’s character lived (and which Fisher’s character took a bazooka to)? It was under the “el” tracks down on Van Buren Street in the South Loop (back when the area was decrepit), and I still remember one of my first assignments for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago was to report on the fire that destroyed the building for real.

So what brings all of this to mind? The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events likes to show movies on a giant screen in Millennium Park. Tuesday night will be a showing of The Blues Brothers. Admission is free and you can sit outside and get a laugh (unless you’re so politically uptight that you can’t bear the thought of watching a film in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn).

MEANING BELUSHI (the native of suburban Wheaton) AND Ackroyd will live on, as will the music of the late Brown and Cab Calloway (“Minnie the Moocher” will never die because of this film).

And even that moment when we learn that Bob’s Country Bunker features both kinds of music – country AND western. Where we’re also subjected to a ludicrous Belushi/Ackroyd take on the Tammy Wynette classic “Stand By Your Man.”

The combination of elements of current Chicago and bits that are long past are something that always amuse me and make the film (along with “Medium Cool” from 1969).

The latter film showed us the Grant Park of the past that became the site of anti-war protests back in the Vietnam era, the Uptown neighborhood of old, and the lengthy shot early in the film of a man on motorcycle rushing videotape from an auto accident scene back to the TV studios downtown (riding along the length of Lake Shore Drive into the Loop) is one that captivates me because of the number of times I’ve made a similar drive during my life.

THERE'S ALSO THE Chicago of "Call Northside 777," but much of it is before my time, and was long ago subjected to the bulldozer. What a shame.

Yet those don't compare to the compare to the bit in The Blues Brothers when Illinois Nazis (yes, we all “hate” Illinois Nazis) wishing to kill the musical duo drive off the end of an incomplete bridge, and wind up soaring thousands of feet into the air before crashing down into a car-sized Chicago street pothole.

Which the Blues Brothers conveniently happen to drive right over in their one-time Mount Prospect police squad car. Silly? Ridiculous? Totally absurd? Of course.

But didn’t I warn you the film was nonsensical!?!

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