Lyons, Goldstein, Stein @The Sun Sentinel

July 14, 2012
Lyons, Goldstein, Stein
@The Sun Sentinel

RE: Talk about a fart in church – More bad news from Chicago

Sirs,

So concerned was I with the shootings in Chicago, shootings on a scale that rival Kabul or Damascus, shootings with an intensity straight from the OK Corral, that I feared the worst of all possible worlds.

The New York Times has identified the newest from of racist killer, the “white Hispanic”. That is the racial class assigned to George Zimmerman of the Trayvon Martin shooting. I shuddered when I thought of the possibility of a battalion of light skinned Zorros, armed with Fast & Furious weapons, wreaking havoc on the undeserving poor of the Windy City. I was relieved when it turned out just to be roving groups of feral Black youth killing each other. Escalades and Navigators filled with spoiled teens from Winnetka and Evanston had nothing to do with these killings.

The question of crime is sub-divided, like Gaul, into 3 parts. One part, Black on Black, is greeted with ennui. Spike Lee doesn’t Tweet the address of alleged perpetrators of Black killings if the shooters are Black. No bounty is issued for the head of the killer of a Black kid as long as the killer is also Black. Somebody will write a song about it featuring “hos”, “pigs”, “The Man”, and why it is someone else’s fault.

Chicago is a funny town. The Mayor begs the killers to stop killing underage kids. He appeals, so help me, to their “values”. Perhaps there is a place for photo IDs after all.

I continued my intriguing search of Chicago.

The facts would support the interpretation that my disclosing the following might be schadenfreude. Even better than that, the research made me positively tumescent.

There is an article written by Michael Oneal on Page 3D of Saturday’s Sun Sentinel .It is about the emergence of the Tribune Company, your employer, from Bankruptcy Court.

I mention it because based on your collective writings the only contact any of you would have with any business section would be as Plan B should you come up short in the smallest room in the house. Any economic policy that begins with “fair share” and an ever increasing minimum wage bespeaks – what’s the word I’m looking for? – an ignorance on a scale that only a Homer could describe.

But wait. There’s more.
The Judge has awarded the corpus – that’s what it’s called – to a group of hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment bankers. Upon assuming control they will simultaneously move to dump the losers and sell the winners.

Get your resumes in order

I just found out that one of the hedge funds has a substantial minority owner controlled by the Koch Brothers.

Did any of you ever think that you would be working for them?

It is beyond irony that the better you do to generate revenues for your employer the more money they will have to exercise their First Amendment Right to Free Speech.

I am going to buy multiple copies of the Sentinel secure in the knowledge that my bit to raise revenues will result in stories about Obama’s half-brother living in a mud hut, stories about the shovel ready jobs being not quite shovel ready, film clips of him talking about the 57 or 58 states, about his hunt for the Austrian-English dictionary, about the United States Marine “Corpse”, about his complete befuddlement concerning the intricacies of throwing a baseball, about his wife spending money as if she earned it. It is what Naval Aviators call a “target rich environment”.

The President has never signed the front of a paycheck. He now has los cojones grandes to babble on about “outsourcing” as the focus of evil in society. Ralph Lauren, a substantial donor [Is $600,000 still “substantial”?] to both the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee, designed the official uniforms for the United States Olympic Team. Would you believe it if I were to tell you that they were made in China? I wouldn’t either. Alas, they were. If that’s not “outsourcing” what is?

One of the requirements for working at a Koch Brothers owned media outlet is that you subscribe to a loyalty oath. Inter alia, Alger Hiss was guilty, the Rosenbergs did it and should be dug up every year and executed again just to be sure, Joe McCarthy got a bad press, and Nixon is still the one are some of the things with which you must agree. Also, short arm inspections and concealed weapons permits are mandatory. Assault weapons purchased for home defense is a reimbursable expense. Plus, you must shop at Wal-Mart.

It seems to me that your only honorable way out of this is to resign.

There is another option.

I remember when the late Democratic Congressman Tom Lontos, as modern an American Liberal as one could possibly be and not believe in the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny, asked Craig Livingstone, the official gate keeper of the Clinton White House, to consider suicide as way to stop embarrassing the already embarrassed Democratic Party [Travel Gate? Foster Gate? File Gate? Do any of them sound familiar?]

Just ask and I will provide you with a variety of edged instruments.

It is said that the only thing that you cannot do with a K-Bar bayonet is to sit on it. An exception, in this case 3 exceptions, will be made.





KEVIN SMITH
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET



PS – Duty commands me to comment on the touchy matter of Jesse Jackson, Jr, another Chicago favorite. Not on his condition or his treatment but on what his mother said. “He’s disappointed that he didn’t become a Senator or Mayor.” God’s Holy Trousers, but she said that! If young Jackson had gone to one of the really fine public schools in Washington, DC perhaps he would have been toughened up a bit. His parents chose to send him to St. Alban’s School .where the tuition now is $47,000 a year and you have to bring your own lunch. Too bad no one told him about Kipling. Not where he writes of the White Man’s Burden which is as relevant today as it was when it was written, but the part about “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same”. A lot of people are upset that they never mastered the cello or helped to find the Higgs boson. I don’t see them reaching for the Thorazine enema or the Ritalin IV.