EXTRA: How many would vote for Hitler? Maybe now we know for sure

Call it a tacky joke, if you will.

JONES: Returning to political obscurity

But I can remember newsroom humor on Election Days of the past when particularly ideologically-conservative candidate would run.

WE'D TAKE A look at the number of votes they'd get, and say, "Now we know how many people would vote for Hitler, if he were on the ballot."

Which is the thought that popped into my head Tuesday night when I saw just how many people thought Art Jones was worthy of their vote for a seat in Congress -- the Illinois 3rd district seat, to be exact.

Jones is the long-time white supremacist who managed to get himself the Republican nomination to run for Congress earlier this year. Which means he was up for election on Tuesday. He lost to Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., who will return to Congress representing Chicago's Southwest Side and surrounding suburbs.

For the record, Jones had a preliminary vote tally of 53,415 -- which was about one-quarter of the total ballots cast. About the usual percentage for a losing candidate.

THAT WOULD MEAN a certain number were willing to put aside Jones' racist rants and hateful rhetoric (and one-time membership in the American National Socialist Workers Party) about Jewish people and merely regard him as just another Republican.

And yes, "national socialist" is what Na-zi is short for.

  -30-

Rauner really needs to make up his mind on how tied he is to Trump

It has always been the political quandary faced by Gov. Bruce Rauner – he may have anti-organized labor attitudes, but he’s really not interested in all the other conservative issues that the ideologues of our society get worked up over.

RAUNER: Trying to avoid Trump burn

So Rauner has always had to do a rhetorical dance around many issues, particularly whenever the name of Donald J. Trump comes up.

BECAUSE THE LAST thing the governor wants to have happen as he seeks re-election in 2018 is for all the people who despise the idea of “President Donald Trump” to take out that hostility by voting against him.

But there’s also the reality that outside of the Chicago area, the part of Illinois where a Rauner re-election effort will focus much of its attention, Trump has his fans.

As in Illinois would have been amongst the Great Lakes states that swung over into his favor – if only the strong Chicago-area electorate hadn’t have pushed Illinois over into the Hillary Clinton column for the Electoral College.

If Rauner goes too hard in speaking out against the incumbent president, he could wind up finding himself alienating the people he’s going to need if he’s to have any chance of getting re-elected.

SO THAT IS why it was considered somewhat of a bold move on Wednesday at the Illinois State Fair when Rauner used a political rally to rip into the nit-witted way in which Trump has handled responding to the race-motivated violence in Charlottesville, Va.

TRUMP: Taking down all in his path?

Under a headline of Governor lays into Trump, the Chicago Tribune reported that Rauner said, “We must stand together against hatred and racism and bigotry and violence and we must condemn those actions in Charlottesville in the strongest terms.”

Much stronger than the presidential rhetoric about how there’s blame on “both sides” and how “not all of those people were neo-Nazis. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

But just when one thinks Rauner is taking a side and trying to distance himself from the presidential nonsense being spewed to legitimize the people who are the source of our society’s problems, it seems he’s trying not to go too far.

TAKE THE INTERVIEW he gave Friday to WBEZ-FM, where he talked about a pending bill that would limit across the state of Illinois the ability of law enforcement to get itself involved in immigration law enforcement.

How much are J.B., Dems counting on Rauner to beat self

Chicago and Cook County already have such actions on their books – the measures that have caused the Trump types to threaten the federal funding our city and county receive. Rauner won’t say for sure whether he’ll sign it. “An announcement about that in the next couple of days” is as far as he’ll commit.

Could Rauner be contemplating a veto, or some sort of amendatory action, to tamper with the bill that is meant to reinforce the faith people have in their police to behave properly, and which even Rauner himself has called, “a reasonable compromise.”

Something to convince those more ideologically-inclined to keep their faith in him, and not get upset that he bad-mouthed “The Donald” – kicking the president when he’s furthest down (only 38 percent approval as of Friday, according to the Gallup Organization’s daily tracking poll).

OF COURSE, IF he goes too far, he’ll wind up antagonizing the urban electorate of Illinois. What Rauner wants is apathy amongst Chicago voters. What he needs is to not do anything that harms his own interests.

COULTER: Expressing ideologue truth?

Because the ideologues don’t have a natural affinity for him, the significance of that recent outburst by that ninny of a pundit, Ann Coulter, who responded to a Fox News interview the governor gave about education funding in Illinois by saying (rather crudely) Rauner, “either is retarded or is playing retard.”

The honest truth is that if a Democrat manages to win the 2018 gubernatorial election, it’s going to be because Rauner managed to blow it – not because people have any love for J.B. Pritzker or any other Dem hopeful.

Which is what all the mechanizations these days of Rauner are all about – a balancing act to prevent the Age of Trump from incinerating his political future.

  -30-

A fitting result for would-be Confederate memorial on South Side

The national stink over removing all those statues erected across the South to pay tribute to the leaders of the one-time Confederate States is taking on a unique Chicago angle.

They rest in a changed neighborhood and under a U.S. flag. How appropriate for old Confederates

I’m talking about the statue that exists at the Oak Woods Cemetery in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. It marks the spot known as Confederate Mound, which actually is a mass grave for thousands of prisoners of war during the Civil War who were shipped to Chicago, held here and wound up dying here without ever seeing their native South again.

MANY OF US probably don’t realize that the one-time Camp Douglas in Chicago wound up being a prison camp for those southern sympathizers whom U.S. interests wanted held in as remote a place from the actual fighting of the Civil War as possible.

That, and the fact there were business interests based in Chicago that sold the goods to the U.S. military that kept the war going, are the local connections to that long-ago conflict over secession that some of us seem determined to want to revive.

Because those men died here, their remains wound up being buried here. They were denied what they most likely would have desired – a return trip home.

It’s not like we have individual graves paying tribute to those men who were willing to fight for the concept of splitting the United States in two – even though many of them probably had no personal interest in such a concept.

WHICH IS WHY I personally don’t get too worked up over this memorial. It’s a grave marker – as opposed to the statues paying tribute to Lee, Davis, Longstreet or any of the others who had leadership roles in the attempt at creating a new nation based on the concept of white supremacy.

Which is why certain people of today are more than eager to refight its battles – they likely do carry a distorted view of what the Confederacy was and think it somehow legitimizes their own racial nonsense.

Another Oak Woods resident who in life shot down the racial ideals the Confederates held

Which also is why Trump is providing aid and comfort to that twisted element of our society when he talks about "the beautiful statues" that are being removed.

But let’s be honest – the Confederate attempt at creating a constitution bore some similarities to what the United States had at the time. But it included provisions ensuring the continued existence of slavery based on race.

THERE WERE THOSE men who gave their lives maybe because they thought they were fighting to protect their homes. But also because their leaders were protecting their rights to keep other humans enslaved for physical labor.

It may have been an economic issue. But not really.

So for those men who died in prison camp conditions, many due to small pox and cholera, their time in life was miserable enough. But I wonder if their “eternal rest” is something that would disgust them even more.

Because the Grand Crossing neighborhood, like much of the rest of Chicago’s South Side, has undergone a significant change in composition. It’s majority African-American, and most people living there now don’t have a clue that white people ever used to call their homes home. Which creates the oddity of a Confederate grave in a black neighborhood.

AND IN A cemetery that contains, amongst others, the remains of one-time Mayor Washington, Olympic athlete Jesse Owens and Ida B. Wells, who during life campaigned against the practice of lynching.

A front page worth framing?!?

In fact, Oak Woods has become known as a cemetery where many African-American people wish to be buried. If there is an after-life, I’m wondering if those wretched old souls are complaining about the “neighbors” their earthly remains now have.

So as far as whether the grave market depicting a southern infantry soldier with crossed arms ought to be removed, I question whether it’s worth the hassle. Having that marker where it is serves as a reminder of just how out-of-place the whole Confederate cause truly is in our society.

Considering how repulsive that cause and what it truly stood for was, maybe it’s all the more appropriate.

  -30-

Justifying white supremacy? Their efforts to do so further taint the concept

I almost find it amusing the degree to which people try to justify the actions of those in our society who are determined to let their bigotry and prejudice dominate their lives.

 

TRUMP: At the center of it all

The nation’s president, Donald J. Trump, is amongst them, with his daily changes in statements where he’s determined to give the impression that the people who protested against the racists in Charlottesville, Va., are just as much to blame as the bigots who caused the action that resulted in a fatality and many injuries.

I RECENTLY STUMBLED onto a conversation by some individuals about that incident (I wasn’t a participant; but they knew who I was, that I was there and could hear what they said) who seemed to see a significance in the fact that the white supremacists got a permit from the city for their protest.

But the counter-protesters did not!

Does it really matter that someone took the time to go to City Hall and deal with the bureaucracy to obtain a permit for a public gathering that was intended to rile up the citizenry?

Should it matter that those who were angry went ahead and expressed their outrage? Which is, after all, one of those legal rights our society is based upon. Or do we only permit people to speak out with the appropriate permit in place?

THESE THOUGHTS POPPED into my head after learning of the Tuesday night protest that occurred outside the Chicago Police Department area headquarters at Belmont and Western avenues – three people wound up being arrested.

One tried to strike a police officer while another tried interfering with police when they were arresting someone else. A third insisted on trying to walk during the protest in the middle of the street – instead of the sidewalk as police requested/demanded/insisted.

This protest was meant to express the idea that police were just as much a part of the white supremacist structure of our society.

I have no doubt that some in our society will want to view these people as being the real problem, and not those people who choose to wear swastika-bearing logos or the blood-drop symbol of the Ku Klux Klan or any of the other myriad symbols that exist for fringe groups whose only purpose is to make those white people who join them feel less insecure about their place in life.

THESE PEOPLE WHO are more than eager to shift the blame are the ones to whom Trump is speaking with his continually-changing comments that relate to the happenings of Charlottesville.

Just as Trump knows he got elected president despite the political opposition of a majority of the population who bothered to vote, but doesn’t concern himself with that fact, he’s now focusing on appeasing that segment of society determined to live their lives in some sort of fantasy existence.

One in which it’s still the 19^th Century and certain types of people can be marginalized with full legitimacy.

I’m sure in the mindset of Trump and his staffers, the 46 percent of the electorate who voted for him are the only people who matter – and a majority of them probably have no problem with the presidential double-talk and inability to pick a side against bigotry with regards to this issue.

ONE OTHER POINT that some like to try to make is that the original protest by the supremacists last week was meant to be a statement against the removal of century-old statues (in many cases) commemorating the leaders of the failed Confederacy.

Statues that, in many cases, were erected by government officials wanting to make a public statement about which “side” of the racial equation they were backing.

If anything, the latest outbursts may well wind up scaring enough public officials into wanting to remove those statues because of the stink they impose on our society as a whole.

Which would be a societal plus if the outcry winds up becoming the impetus to removing those memorials to a cause that advocated treason against our nation – and ought to have been eradicated so many decades ago.

  -30-

What kind of twisted twerp thinks white supremacy is the “American” way?

There is one positive aspect I can think of related to the white supremacist rally in Virginia that resulted in fatalities – maybe now we’ll stop thinking of such events as a laughable spectacle.

Popular spot to express Trump contempt

Because that is what happens all too often whenever these people with their racial hang-ups insist on exercising their right to free expression (their ‘right to be wrong’) – the end result is usually something so laughable.

WE GET OUR chuckle at the thought anybody could be deluded enough to think such thoughts. We comment about third-rate brown shirts who likely would have been rejected by the real Nazi Party had they tried to join back in 1930s-era Germany.

Or maybe we joke about wondering just how those Klansmen get their sheets so white.

We laugh them off because the spectacle usually is ludicrous.

Like the time I once covered a Klan rally held outside the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield – the Klan chaplain (I forget the goofy K-laden title they gave him) led the protesters in a “prayer” that God strike Planet Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the undesirable life forms and leaving the globe free and clear for white people.

ROCKWELL: Brought Nazis to United States

OR ANOTHER RALLY I once covered outside the Bloomington, Ill., hospital where American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell was born. They laid a wreath to pay tribute to their founder, and the followers who came uniformed in swastika armbands and helmets took a public pledge that bore some resemblance to the one that the “Illinois Nazis” took in the film “The Blues Brothers.”

Remember? They pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler, only to see the one-time Mount Prospect police car driven by noted scofflaw Elwood Blues come roaring at them – forcing them to all dive into a nearby river.

The rally held recently in Charlottesville, Va., had no such laughable moments.

TRUMP: Election emboldened modern-day Nazis?

What wound up happening was that a white supremacist backer drove his car into the group of counter-demonstrators who wanted to make their opposition known.

WE NOW HAVE fatalities caused by these people whose insecurities about life cause them to want to think the accident of Caucasian conception makes them a superior form of life.

One-time Klan leader and Louisiana politico David Duke described the events as being one of, “We are determined to take our country back.” President Donald Trump has taken some abuse because his initial statements about the matter came so many hours after it occurred, and were lukewarm as though he were trying to shift blame to the counter-protesters – who are the ones who suffered a casualty in all this.

When Trump tried making a harsher statement that acknowledged the absurdity of the white supremacists, Duke retorted by telling the president, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was white Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

These are the racist ideologues who were the bulk of the 46 percent of the electorate that was able to give Trump an Electoral College victory making it clear they won’t be ignored.

IT’S GOING TO be hard for Trump to continue to deny he’s president because of the bigots amongst us who saw his repeated ridiculous rhetoric as backing of their own racist ideals. Particularly since the gaudy tower that contains the hotel he operates in Chicago is now a popular gathering place for the protesters.

Friday's incident not comical like this Blues Brothers scene

That may be the significance of the counter-protests held Saturday and Sunday in Chicago, amongst other cities, in which people were able to peacefully express their outrage over the racist radicals who think this Age of Trump is their age of empowerment!

Many of us who would have dismissed Friday’s event for the Wal-mart-purchased Tiki torches carried by the white supremacist protesters or the ridiculous attempts at being clad in paramilitary gear are going to have to take a more serious look at this segment of our society.

Which may be a minority going about chanting “You will not replace us.” But it is one with an un-American ideal in that they’d want to use their freedom of expression to overpower everyone not like themselves into a position of submission.

  -30-

Has Chicago become an island of sanity in “red” sea of bigoted nonsense?

My initial reaction to the Election Night results across the nation were to feel fortunate that Illinois, with Chicago in particular, had proved to be a bastion of sanity.

There's a reason we now flip the "bird" at this building

While the bulk of the nation seems to have gone goofy over the notion of Donald J. Trump capable of being in charge, it would appear that we have maintained a bit of sense. Or we’re not caught up in the stupidity prevailing elsewhere.

THAT ATTITUDE GOT reinforced after I stumbled my way Wednesday through the nation’s news reports, what with the attitudes of bigotry being on the rise seeming somewhat scary. I feel fortunate that we don’t have things as blatant in Chicago as in elsewhere.

And before you snicker at my naivete, I know full well the history of Chicago (it was here that Martin Luther King, Jr., got hit in the head with a brick) and the attitudes that still prevail. I know full well there are those parts of the city where certain types of people ought not seriously think of entering – unless they’re looking to provoke an outburst!

The report that most intrigued me was a Washington Post report about the situation in Whitefish, Mont. It seems that the mother of a prominent white supremacist activist/writer has opened a business there, has white supremacist activists taking her up as their pet cause!

The activists are upset that many local residents of Whitefish don’t like having her around and would prefer she get lost! As in leave, sell her property, and donate a chunk of the proceeds from the sale to a civil rights organization of their choosing.

Wishing they could be spared nonsense

ALL OF WHICH has neo-Nazi activists inclined to want to go to Whitefish to engage in protests on behalf of the mother – whom it seems doesn’t really know much about her son’s activities and isn’t really the kind of person who’d naturally be connected to these Nutzis.

The situation has become so heated that Montana’s governor and attorney general, along with senators and representative, have all signed a letter expressing their support for the locals – and against any white supremacist activity deciding to use their state as the site of their efforts to assert their control over the situation.

I’m old enough to remember when would-be Nazis wanted to march in Skokie and know at heart that they really weren’t interested in expressing any view – it was about intimidation.

It was all about intimidation, not expression, back in '77 in Skokie

They wanted to wear their swastika armbands and get up close to those older residents who had come to this country in the years following the German Holocaust. As though implying that the day would come when they’d be back in a death camp – and this time, they wouldn’t come out alive!

NOT THAT THESE nitwits would have ever been capable of pulling this off. Just as I doubt that these crackpots wanting to visit Whitefish would really be capable of forcing themselves on the local residents – whom it seems don’t want their town to carry a racist taint.

Which is what some of these activists now carry considering that they feel emboldened by the presidential victory of Donald J. Trump – whom no matter how much he says otherwise got elected through their political support. For Trump to deny the fact comes across as ridiculous as those neo-Nazi types who try denying that Jewish people were harassed back in the Germany of the 1930s.

Then, there are the ongoing legal proceedings concerning Dylann Roof. He’s that South Carolina punk who thinks he showed how much of a man he really is by walking into a black-oriented church and opening fire – killing nine.

Roof has been found guilty and could face the death penalty. Prosecutors already have their list of witnesses they want to call to try to persuade jurors to grant a death sentence.

ROOF: Sees self as hero. Will anyone else?

BY COMPARISON, ROOF said in court Wednesday he’s not planning to call anybody to defend himself. Although he does want to make a statement in court.

Likely to be some self-righteous bit of nonsense he’ll spew about the propriety of his actions. In his own mind, he’s a revolutionary who was taking action to fight for the same cause that was advanced with Trump’s political victory.

For all we know, he’ll go to his death strapped to the gurney with the lethal injection going into his veins – thinking that history will remember him heroically.

Which may be the most tragic part of the Trump political victory – is that it reinforces the nonsense these kind of people like to spew about our society. And that while not every person who backed Trump with their vote can be classified as “racist,” it can be said that they’re willing to look the other way at the repulsiveness of the people whose side they’re now on!

  -30-

“Alt-right” synonymous with “bigot?”

It is the new phrase that came out of the 2016 election cycle; “alt-right.” As in not the standard issue conservative who leans toward the Republican party, but an alternate version.
 

TRUMP: Election opened nasty can of worms

Of course, what makes them alternative is that their racial hang-ups are a little more intense. In fact, they are the base of these people having anything resembling a political philosophy.

IF WE WANTED to be purely honest, we’d simply say they’re bigots. But the “alt-right” term comes from those people who want to legitimize any sense that one’s racial sentiments ought to be permitted to be a basis for government policy.

And also don’t want anything resembling use of the term “cracker” to refer to themselves.

Now I know there are some people who are getting upset these days with the perception that the Republican Party has been overtaken by bigots. They want to think there’s some moralistic overtone to the conservative thought process by which they have become the political party for white people.

They want to argue that not every person who cast a vote for Donald Trump’s presidential bid did so for racial reasons. In short, they’re willing to talk a lot of smack to avoid the very real fact of modern-day politics.

PEOPLE WHO VOTED for Trump either really do have the ridiculous notion that white people are being discriminated against because they’re no longer permitted to discriminate against people not like themselves. Or, they’re more than willing to look the other way when it comes to being around the bigots of our society.

Perhaps to them the notion of being around non-white people with some authority is more offensive than being around white people who are willing to use physical force to maintain their sense of place in the world.

I have one person I knew back in college who, on Facebook recently, said we ought to refuse to use the term “alt-right” and replace it with “all white.” It would be more accurate, she says, if we didn’t try to make the term “alt-white” sound respectable.

How far will alt-right rewrite history?

Yet this is going to be the very focus of much of the rhetoric we’re going to hear in coming years. There are people who must take seriously notion expressed by author George Orwell (as in “1984”) that “history is written by the winners.”

THEY PROBABLY THINK this past election cycle was a “war” in which they’re trying to take back the country from all of society’s undesirables – as in the ones whom the deplorables think are truly disgusting because of their repulsive sensibilities about life!

In that context, “alt-right” is merely a part of rewriting history. And not seeing the incredibly obvious in that photograph playing big on the Internet these days with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in front and a whole slew of white people filling the room.

It is a way where we can go back to the old way of thinking of things, in which a “Martin Luther King, Jr.” was a borderline-Communist agitator for spouting out nonsense about equality and non-violence who tried falsely to portray himself as a Christian.

Let’s not forget that some people do have a twisted sense of their Christian religious faith – I still remember once covering a Ku Klux Klan rally outside the Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., where their “pastor” led everybody in a prayer for God to strike the Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the non-white people.

NOT EXACTLY IN line with any serious religious teachings I have ever heard.

Yet these are the individuals who are being given some credence. Who are being treated as though they have something essential for our society to hear. And whose hostile rhetoric somehow bears a legitimacy to what else is being said.

So how should we truly think of these people? What terms should we use to describe them with a sense of honesty?

There are times when I watch the old “All in the Family” reruns on television and think that actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character bears relevance to what is happening today. Which makes me wonder if actor Sherman Hemsley’s “George Jefferson” is who many of us will turn to for the proper retort!

  -30-

EXTRA: Somebody wasn’t paying close enough attention to film

I’m not going to get all worked up over the nonsense being spewed down in Urbana-Champaign by those people purporting to be the White Student Union, who are ensuring that the views of white people are not overpowered by those of black people.

It’s too stupid to take seriously, for one thing. For another, I find one of their supporting arguments to be total nonsense.

THIS UNION ISN’T an actual group. It’s a Facebook page that was put up this week, then taken down, then restored and is now the subject of a fight over University of Illinois officials.

For it seems that one of the items that got posted on the page in support of their arguments that black people ought to just shut up and quit their whining was a video snippet from the 1998 film “American History X.”

In that film, actor Edward Norton’s “Derek Vinyard” character goes on a rant about how black people have no right to think of themselves as being hurt by slavery.

“Lincoln freed the slaves some 130 years ago. How long does it take you to get your act together,” his character said.

YET THAT IS such a weak argument because the film doesn’t support it. Actually, that film has Norton playing a character just released from prison following a two-year stretch for killing a black man.

During his time, he came to see the hypocrisy of his racial rhetoric and the people who espoused it, and upon prison was desperately trying to get himself and his brother – played by actor Edward Furlong – out of the white supremacy movement.

That particular scene was meant to be a flashback showing just how far gone and stupid the Derek Vinyard character was. It seems someone with this alleged group has no sense of context.

Either that, or they ought to be forced to write the paper about race relations that Furlong’s character was assigned to write at the film’s beginning. Perhaps they’d learn something and realize how nitwit-ish their White Student Union truly is!

  -30-

Having to flee one’s home ought to be a disgrace on an Independence Day

I recall a day from back when I was a kid and my brother and I went with our mother for a day-long visit to grandma’s house.

Putting in overtime this coming weekend

What provoked this visit wasn’t any real desire to see the relatives. It was that there was talk of white supremacists feeling the need to come to our neighborhood in suburban Lansing and hold a rally of sorts, just a couple of blocks from where we lived.

NOW I DON’T remember the specifics of this particular rally, which would have been back in the late 1970s. I seem to recall a local radio personality (and by local, I mean someone on a suburban-based radio station whom most of Chicago would never have heard of) who got all worked up over “Roots” being shown on television.

So perhaps it was a batch of crackpots showing unity in their outrage over having some of the horrors of slavery in this country being illustrated on national television – and living on to this day on DVD.

Or maybe it was some other outrage the bigots felt. Quite frankly, those people rarely have any sense of logic about the way they perceive anything. So who knows what bothered them?

All I remember is that my mother didn’t want to be around. So off to grandma’s we went.

IF MY MEMORY is correct, that rally didn’t amount to much. I was told by people who didn’t leave that day that it turned into a few people yelling and shouting and screaming and pretty much making fools of themselves.

I do recall that when we came back home, there was quite a bit of trash strewn around the streets on the block where we lived. Much more than would be if it were just a neighbor’s dog running loose and getting into the neighbor’s trash cans.

But that was the extent. A fairly minor incident, and not one whose details have really clung into the crevasses of my mind.

Not everybody will view Independence Day in this way

Although that feeling of having to leave our home for the day because we didn’t want to get caught up as collateral damage, of sorts, popped into my mind Wednesday when I stumbled across a Chicago Tribune report about how some Chicagoans are planning weekend trips this weekend because they don’t want to get struck by stray gunfire.

I FEEL GRATEFUL that I have never lived in a South Side neighborhood where such an approach to life during the holidays is commonplace.

Although it strikes me as particularly odd that on a holiday meant to celebrate the ideals upon which this nation was founded (“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and all that jazz), some people feel the way to protect their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness is to skip town.

Because there are those individuals who view Independence Day solely in the context of explosives and the chance to set off rounds of gunfire.

As a reporter-type person, I have seen the many holiday weekends in which people wind up getting picked off by stray bullets. I remember one incident where a bullet fired into the air wound up coming back to Earth about a mile away before someone got shot (although the oddest incident I recall from my police reporter days was the naked woman being chased around 95^th Street and Western Avenue on a New Year’s Eve some three decades ago).

THE NEWSPAPER REPORTED about how there also will be extra police on duty this holiday weekend. Hospitals also are working to ensure they won’t be short-staffed if they get a sudden flood of gunshot wound victims.

It makes my one-time incident of having to see grandma for a full day seem kind of minor by comparison, because it wasn’t an annual tradition of a trip that we planned to make just to survive.

So while some people may think the quintessential Chicago holiday weekend is attending the Grateful Dead (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) concert or festivities at Navy Pier, keep in mind that some people think a successful holiday involves just staying alive.

  -30-

Recalling Hale’s violin

It has been quite a while since I have given Matt Hale any thought.

 

But the native of East Peoria, Ill., is back in the news because of his violin, the instrument he tried to use many decades ago to try to give himself a sophisticated image – or at least sophistication compared to the usual ranks of white supremacist activists trying to peddle their image of what our society ought to be like.

 

FOR THOSE OF you who have forgotten, or are too young to remember, Hale was a product of the 1990s who managed to get himself into the national news because he was a law school graduate who was denied the chance to get a law license in Illinois.

 

The state officials who handle such licensing matters for the legal profession ruled that Hale’s racist views, which he didn’t try to conceal., were inconsistent with someone who was an officer of the court and supposed to uphold the law.

 

It was one of those freak stories. Hale, who said he wanted to be a lawyer who represented other white supremacists when they ran afoul of the law, was kind of a sad joke. But he took the attention to mean that he had something significant to say to society at large.

 

He kept pushing his image into the public eye until he eventually got caught up with what federal prosecutors said were his attempts to try to arrange the murder of a U.S. district judge in Chicago. He was found guilty and got a 40-year prison sentence, which he is still serving at a closed-security facility in Colorado.

 

MEANING HE SPENDS the bulk of the day locked in his cell, and has only minimal contact with other people.

 

I suspect the isolation is for his own good. I could envision many other inmates thinking they could bolster their jailhouse ‘cred’ by trying to kill him.

 

But being locked away from other people is bound to do something to the mentality of just about anybody who has to endure such treatment. Hale claims his treatment in prison violates his civil rights.

 

Which has led him to file a lawsuit against the federal government seeking $19 million in compensation for the harm being done to him. Or so he claims!

 

ALTHOUGH THE CHICAGO Tribune reported Tuesday how Hale offered to drop his lawsuit in exchange for one personal concession. He wants his violin back. He wants to be able to play it while in his cell.

 

There could be a cell block in Colorado where inmates would have to endure his rusty playing (who knows how long it has been since he has held an instrument?).

 

Then again, maybe not.

 

For the newspaper reported that federal officials rejected his request. They’re also not offering up anything in the way of explanation as to why he can’t have a violin.

 

IS IT POSSIBLE that the bow could be construed as a weapon? Or converted into something that could cause harm? It wouldn’t shock me to learn that federal officials try to make that claim. Then again, prison inmates are people with a lot of free time that they can use to concoct assorted schemes.

 

Imaginations run wild can cause great harm if not closely watched enough.

 

Although that violin reminds me of the old days when Hale first cropped onto the public scene. I still recall every television reporter who felt compelled to interview Hale had to include two images in particular – the toilet bowl in Hale’s father’s home that had a Star of David inside it, and the sight of Hale playing his violin.

 

Maybe Hale thinks if he gets his violin back, he can somehow turn back the clock when he was a young man with potential for a future – instead of just another inmate who has more than two more decades of time to serve before he can dream of freedom!

 

  -30-

It’s business, not personal

Could actor Tom Hanks’ “Joe Fox” character in “You’ve Got Mail” have actually been on to something when he typed an Instant Message about the film, “The Godfather” that it, “is the I-Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question.”

For it was “The Godfather” that gave us the line, “This is business, not personal.”

AND THAT SEEMS to be the philosophy at work these days at the federal courthouse where a man facing arson and civil rights violation charges and is an admitted white supremacist has a black woman representing him as his attorney.

Although when Brian Moudry made his initial court appearance last week, what caught most peoples’ attention was the fact that he has the words “Blue-eyed Devil” tattooed onto the top of his shaven head.

But the Chicago Tribune gave us a detailed story about the dynamic involved in this particular bit of legal representation. It is an interesting piece of reporting and writing that everybody should read.

And I’m not just saying that because the particular reporter who wrote the story is a former work colleague of mine whom I’ve always had the utmost professional respect for.

SO HOW DOES it work that a white supremacist gets a young black woman attorney who likely represents everything he detests about our society today, and which he probably thinks he’s fighting against?

The key to that description of the attorney is “young.” She’s a public defender. She handles the criminal cases of indigent defendants who can’t afford to get themselves an attorney of their choice.

This was purely a luck of the draw. She didn’t pick him any more than he picked her, although the Tribune reported that upon their first meeting just prior to the court appearance, Moudry said he had no objection to her.

Which could be a matter of practicality on his part. It may also turn out that he will get his own attorney at some point in the future.

BUT I’M NOT sure I consider this to be the biggest stretch I have ever seen in a courtroom.

For I have encountered cases in the past where attorneys who happen to be Jewish wind up representing white supremacists – usually justifying taking the cases on the grounds that they’re sticking up for some higher principle in life and our society.

Get them to talk privately, and the defendants will usually rationalize the pairing by making a wisecrack about “Jew snakes” working on their behalf for a change.

But it is the reality that the law applies equally to all, and that competent, qualified and skilled attorneys should be capable of handling just about any case within their specialty.

OTHERWISE, WE PROBABLY would have to have a separate legal division of counselors who happen to share the white supremacist take of their clients.

Not that I don’t doubt that some attorneys do have their hang-ups about people who happen to not be of Anglo-Saxon origins. But it would be too much.

Let’s not forget Matt Hale, the man who is now serving a nearly four-decade prison sentence for what prosecutors said were his attempts to have a federal judge killed because he didn’t like her ruling in a legal trademark case involving his self-created white supremacist religion.

Hale originally came to prominence in the mid-1990s when he was a Southern Illinois University law school student who couldn’t get licensed to practice law even though he passed the bar exam because it was felt his racist views of the world were incompatible (he lacked “moral character and fitness”) with the profession.

HALE NEVER MADE any attempt to hide his views. He used to openly say that he thought the white supremacists of the world needed to have legal counsel who would aggressively defend their views – rather than just try to rationalize their defense on the grounds of some “free speech” principle (and the legal fees being paid).

Nobody bought that argument back then, which is why we really shouldn’t be shocked to see what happened this past week. If they had, perhaps we’d be seeing Hale’s legal skills at work in this particular case.

Instead, we’re not, as Hale is languishing in prison (another 25 years to go before he could be eligible for early release) out in Colorado. Perhaps that means all is well with our society, as it now stands. 

All because somebody’s willing to follow the principle from “The Godfather” about “business” versus “personal.” Now if we could only find a practical way to use the advice about, "Leave the gun, take the canoli."

  -30-

Not all activity confined to Chicago

Why do I suspect that long after the typical Chicagoan has forgotten about the “chaos” caused by NATO Summit protesters, they’re still going to be pondering what happened Saturday in suburban Tinley Park?

That “happening” was an off-the-wall attack that took place at the Ashford House restaurant on 159^th Street in the southwest suburb, which on Monday looked from the outside like nothing was out-of-the ordinary.

A DIGITAL SIGNBOARD outside the restaurant touted prime rib dinners for $30 apiece.

Yet just about every report coming up these days indicates that business has stunk the past two days. Nobody seems too anxious to eat there, even though the area is far from a high-crime neighborhood.

This was the restaurant where a group of up to 15 people (the number keeps changing, but seems to be about a dozen) were attacked by masked men who charged into the restaurant bearing bats and hammers.

Five people from that latter group have been arrested, and bond has been set for them on the criminal charges they now face.

BUT BEFORE ONE gets the sense that these were innocent bystanders who got beat up, it seems that among the portions of the Internet that attract the white supremacists of the world, this gathering at the restaurant was being billed as almost a convention, of sorts, for white supremacists.

Or white racialists. Or white nationalists, or whatever other goofy label those people try to come up with to legitimize their bigoted babble.

And from what police have said, the group that did the attacking is describing itself as an “anti-racism” group that seems to want to take things up a notch in expressing their opposition to a group of people who are a stain on our society.

At this point, nobody really knows for sure what any of these people really stand for, although Cook County prosecutors said during bond hearings for the five men now facing charges that the people who were attacked were all part of a group calling itself the Illinois European Heritage Association.

IS THIS REALLY just a group of white people who are taking pride in their ethnic origins? Or is that use of ethnicity just a cover for a group that dreams of the day when they can have a supremacy in our society that they don’t seem to merit by their own qualifications!

Personally, I have found that groups with legitimate interests in promoting their ethnicity are specific about what their ethnic origins are. “European” in this context is overly generic and reeks a bit too much not so much of “white” but of “not black.”

So it is believable that these people who got attacked aren’t exactly like you or me, even though I have noticed some conservative ideologues already are anxious to portray this event as a matter of violence against regular people trying to eat a meal.

Nonsense!!!!

WHAT CATCHES MY attention about all of this is the fact that none of these people have anything to do with the Chicago area. With the exception of the couple of restaurant employees who happened to be working Saturday when the outburst occurred and got caught – so to speak – in the crossfire.

The European “Heritage” group’s members don’t live around here. The people who organized this “event” said they chose suburban Tinley Park because of its centralized location – which is true because of the fact that Interstate 80 cuts through the southern edge of town and Interstate 57 is just to the east.

Which in all likelihood is why the now-shuttered Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park was the site of that 2008 shooting that left five people dead. It was all about location.

It would be easy for those living around the Midwestern U.S. to drive to this location without having to travel too deeply into Chicago proper.

EVENB AMONG THE five men who are the attackers and who believe they are standing up for decency and justice in our society aren’t from here. They all gave Indiana addresses – and I don’t mean the part of the Chicago metro area that crosses over State Line Road into the Hoosier State.

Every single one of these individuals made a special (and lengthy) trip to be here.

Why couldn’t they have found some other way of keeping themselves busy this weekend? Why not just stay home and cause trouble there?

A part of me is pleased to know that these are out-of-towners. Because it makes me glad to believe that the people of metro Chicago, by and large, are too sane to do something like this.

IT’S THOSE WACKY out-of-towners, who perhaps have turned out like this because they don’t experience the joys of living in Chicago – which I will always view as one of the nation’s great cities.

Then, there’s the bottom line. For an event that some believe was meant to be a gathering of racists to engage in trite trash-talk, there’s something about the image that they could only get a dozen people to show up that is reassuring.

The overwhelming majority of us are too sane to take such talk seriously.

  -30-