Re-elect Burke? Tough, but the Chicago ‘Rules’ won’t rule out possibility

Call them, if you will, the “rules” by which the Chicago electorate tends to operate when it comes to Election Day behavior.

BURKE: Could he still win Feb. 26?

It’s not wrong to cast a ballot for someone who faces some sort of indictment or other criminal charge. We literally take that “innocent until proven guilty” staple and want to see a criminal conviction before we’ll believe the worst in political people.

TO THE POINT where some people even try arguing that a public official ought to be able to remain in office right up to the day they’re carted off and sent to ‘da slammer.’

The other rule might not be a Chicago rule as just a good rule of thumb for understanding the concept of Latino political empowerment and why the number of Latino elected officials doesn’t equal their share of the population. It’s that the Latino Election Day turnout often stinks to the point of embarrassment.

It also helps to understand that despite what conservative ideologues want to believe, Chicago is NOT some politically radical place. Our Democratic majorities often consist of people who are fairly neutral minded – except to those ideologues whose idea of “moderate” is somewhere to the right of Atilla, the Hun.

It is so unlikely that our city would ever produce a pseudo-radical such as New York City’s new member of Congress, Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez. The woman whose very presence offends the right likely would have been too offensive to Chicago voters, IF she lived here rather than in the Bronx.

THIS LITTLE COLLECTION of pithy comments is the basis of why I’m not prepared to write off the chance of Edward M. Burke getting himself re-elected to another term in the City Council that would give him the beginning of a second half-century as a Chicago alderman.

GARCIA: Can his influence beat Burke?

Now as to whether he can survive long enough to finish out another four-year term running through 2023, I don’t know!

Burke may well be in a deep-enough legal predicament that he won’t be around come that year. He may have to resign himself in ways more significant than giving up the Finance committee chairmanship – the title that allowed him to bop about City Hall like a Lord and treat the rest of the aldermen as his minions.

Personally, I wonder about the legitimacy of the charges, but I also know many people will be swayed by the very fact that the federal government is proceeding with the process that eventually will put Burke on trial – OR pressure him into pleading guilty to something ominous sounding.

WHILE OTHERS ALSO are so eager to see Burke “taken down” for something sounding criminal that they’ll believe it just has to be – even if they really can’t explain it or comprehend why it ought to be illegal.

But whether Burke is guilty of a federal offense or not is really a completely different question from whether he can win re-election.

I can’t help but notice the significant amounts of campaign cash he already has, combined with the fact he had a fundraising event recently to add to the $12 million total he already had. There are many people in the legal community who are now on the record as being willing to offer the greatest act of support they can give a politician – a campaign contribution.

There will be those who will view the growing number of Latinos who live in that particular ward (nearly four of every five residents) as some sort of threat, and Burke’s re-election as maintaining of tradition.

AS TO HOW he tries to appeal to Latinos to not view him as the enemy, it literally has me wondering if he’s out to position himself as a modern-day descendant of the San Patricios. That being the 1840s unit of Irish immigrants who came to this country, enlisted in the U.S. military, then responded to intense anti-Catholic/immigrant prejudice by switching sides during the Mexican/American War.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Too radical to win Chicago?

Traitors to the ideologues, they are heroes to the Mexican people – viewed as Irish allies to the idea of their independence. Which is how I’m sure Burke would like the Mexican/American populace of his ward to think of himself.

Even before the indictment, Burke was going about as making himself a backer of people offended by use of the Gary/Chicago International Airport (funded partially by the city Department of Aviation) as part of the process of deporting people from this country.

Will it work? I don’t know. Just another of the many questions that will make this particular aldermanic race a battle – rather than the usual shoo-in – for Burke. But not, so sayeth the Chicago Rules, an improbability.

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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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South Side Irish w/o alcohol almost like a Cubs ballclub with a championship

Can you have the South Side Irish parade without the stink of alcoholic beverages wafting through the air?

A comeback?



I’m sure there are some people who will be skeptical, and some may decide a new event would not be worth their time if the police are going to be expected to check everybody’s packages to see if they’re trying to slip a liquor bottle into the proceedings.

BUT I COULDN’T help but get a little kick out of the reports this week that people in the Beverly neighborhood want to resurrect the parade that for 31 years created a spectacle along Western Avenue near 103^rd Street and for some people was the REAL St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

As opposed to the official city-wide parade that in recent years has been held along Columbus Drive (leading to quips about ol’ Italian explorer Cristobal becoming an honorary Irishman for the day).

The parade in Beverly ended after the 2009 version largely because the crowds coming in from all across the metropolitan area were so intense, and literally were bringing so much of their own liquor into the neighborhood.

The event had become a virtual Intoxication Fest. That last parade had 54 people get arrested – one of whom thought it somehow made sense to hit a police officer.

IF ANYTHING, THE event had become an embarrassment to the public perception of Beverly – which always used to like to think of itself as some sort of upper-crust neighborhood where people settled once their families had worked their way through immigrant status and had established themselves of sort.

The “lace curtain Irish,” so to speak, rather than those who had to work with their hands engaged in physical labor for a living.

Of course, Beverly also has become one of those neighborhoods on the fringe of the city limits where municipal workers who must live within the city boundaries choose to purchase homes.

So I’m sure much of this bad behavior from out-of-neighborhood people was probably occurring in the proximity of the actual homes of police officers and mid-ranking city officials.

PEOPLE WITH PULL used it to yank the plug on the parade.

And now, those people in the neighborhood with some pull are hoping they can resurrect an event that they can say is the parade – only on a smaller scale that might not attract so many booze-hounds.

That will be the trick.

Because the South Side Irish parade of old attracted people from all over who merely wanted to revel with the smell of cheap beer wafting through the air.

I LITERALLY RECALL one time I took a Metra Rock Island line train (the one from Joliet to LaSalle Street Station that makes several stops throughout the Beverly neighborhood) into Chicago on the day of South Side Irish.

It may have been a Sunday, but that train was packed with people bringing their own coolers loaded with liquor. Some of them were engaged in some serious drinking on the train – which means they likely were loaded before they ever set foot in Beverly.

I don’t even want to think of what they did once they got into the neighborhood, or how many local residents wound up having their lawns or alleys (if not both) urinated upon that day – although I’m sure those Lake View neighborhood residents who experience the same thing 81 days a year (whenever the Chicago Cubs play at home) would sympathize.

Reading the reports about a neighborhood meeting this week to discuss the potential future of South Side Irish, it seems local officials want to create something resembling an Irish festival along Western Avenue – with the parade itself being a small part  the events.

THEY THINK THAT might encourage people who bring kids, whose presence might discourage all of those buffoons who are merely looking for a chance to get intoxicated in public (as though there aren’t enough other opportunities for them across the city).

In fact, James “Skinny” Sheahan (brother of the former county Sheriff and city alderman) went so far as to say this week, “there should be no alcohol during the parade, period.”

It’s a nice sentiment. But I’m not sure how practical it is going to be to expect police to inspect every single individual who decides to come to the event.

Because like I wrote earlier, this event in the past attracted some serious crowds. Unless you’re willing to divert a significant percentage of the Police Department to crowd control duty in that one neighborhood AND start running checkpoints to get to everybody – similar to if Barack Obama himself were to come to Beverly and appear in open.

I JUST DON’T know. Are there devices similar to metal detectors – ones that pick up the presence of filled booze bottles?

About the only alternative is to create an event on such a smaller-scale that it only attracts the residents of Beverly who can walk to Western Avenue.

A “private” parade? It may well please the locals to have this all to themselves. But it defeats the spirit of the old South Side Irish, which was to create an ethnic celebration for the masses to enjoy.

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