Mayor Richard “Little Dickie” Daley

April 20, 2009

Mayor Richard “Little Dickie” Daley
121 North LaSalle Street
Chicago, Illinois 60602-1284

RE: Brush up your Shakespeare! A good name for a song but as public policy goes………. Oy! as one of Shakespeare” more charming characters, a specialist in small non-collateralized loans, by the name of Shylock would say.

My dear Mayor Dickhead,

“But man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant
of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape,
plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”

Your proposal that everybody in Chicago should talk like Shakespeare is beyond parody. Would it be too audacious of me to hope that it was said in jest? Of course.

“Neither wit, nor words, nor worth, nor utterance,
Nor the power of speech to stir men’s blood…”

Rather than “embarrass the servants”, the wannabe felons who do your bidding, with an impossible how work assignment, why not borrow from local talent?

Mr. Hinnisy, the noted Chicago saloon keeper and political sage, said of local politicians, “they seen their opportunities and they took’em”. The choice of roads, either taken or not, in Chicago leads either to prison or to the White House.

“We are all men, in our own natures and capable
of our flesh; men are not angels.”

May I suggest a different model, a template less onerous for the average Cook County civil servant to emulate, than Shakespeare? May I suggest your father?

Your father, a man to step aside for, a man who well and truly earned the sobriquet “Big Dick”, had some memorable sayings, remember?

He was like Jesus in 1960. He raised enough people from the dead to swing the election to John Kennedy. Did he say “Get up and vote”? He didn’t have to. It is a well known fact that it takes embalming fluid plus 7 years into the dirt nap before they stop voting Row A.

In 1968, while his police were outside the Democratic Convention showing those long haired maggots what Chicago thought of their rights by hitting them with their rights, their lefts, their boots, their batons, you father was inside screaming at Senator Ribicoff, “Fuck you, fuck you”! It’s been more than 40 years so I am not sure whether it was he or some faithful city employed toad who yelled “Fuck You, you Jew bastard”.

Not quite like Marc Anthony or Henry the Fifth but his words did have an impact.

In a lighter note, the memory of him leaning over the lectern after Mike Royko asked him some questions on how the city decided who got its insurance business – Royko suggesting that a soupcon of nepotism may have been involved – and saying to him, “You can kiss my ass” would still make the highlight film for politicians practicing reasoned discourse

“For nothing can seem foul to those that win.”

A key to success in Chicago and in Cook County, is
one that you may wish to keep to yourself.

“The jury…may in the sworn twelve have a thief or two
Guiltier than him they try.”

“You rocks, you stones, you senseless things.
Know you not Daley?”

“The rest is silence.”