Archive for August 16th, 2009
Something fun in the works: a new straight voice coming to HillBuzz
Here’s something fun we’re excited about here at HillBuzz. Our straight friend Ray, who used to run the site ChicagoansAgainstObama, is going to be contributing content to us on a rolling basis. Ray teamed up with us on DeMcCrats for McCain efforts here in Chicago: he’s a new school Republican who agrees with us on many things (except our support of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, whom Ray doesn’t seem to appreciate, try as we may to get him to see the light).
But, Ray works in the healthcare field and has a lot of interesting things to say — the stories he tells us are incredible in terms of the graft, waste, and corruption the current administration’s healthcare push will cause. He closed down his own site after the election and has been itching to get back in the game in a sense, so we’re happy to have him pop in here from time to time. Because he used to live in Boystown (with his wife…in a building full of drag queens and leathermen), he gets where we’re coming from on most things (even though he did pull up stakes and recamp to Florida last year, mainly because he loves feeling younger by being around so many old people).
We have no idea when he’ll start posting, but we hope he can take a little of the heavy lifting off us as we continue to sort a lot of things out and recover from a truly brutal summer of loss, stress, job woes, and other problems that have gotten in the way of posting as regularly as we always have. Someday, when we’re totally back on our collective feet and more distantly removed from everything that’s been going on, we hope to be able to share the full story, because there are many lessons to learn from. But, still, it’s all just too much, and too personal, to process and put out there into the world. 2009 has been a monstrous, challenging year — for us personally, and for the nation in so many ways.
As always, we continue to be surprised by how much we as moderate Democrats agree with moderate (and even conservative) Republicans…agreeing more and more as things get worse in this country, it seems. There’s a lot more purple in the world than there is bright red or screaming blue.
We think that’s the driving force behind our continued efforts with this site: showing people Americans can indeed break party lines to do what’s right for the country when need be.
We also bet interplay with someone like Ray could be an interesting feature for us — sort of a Hannity and Colmes where Colmes is gayer and less crazy and better looking and Hannity’s less of an ass and is right more often.
Do you let your children scream in restaurants?
Here’s a question for anyone out there with children, or who watch children on a regular basis: do you let your children scream their heads off in restaurants? If so, why do you do this?
It’s surprising, but we’re seeing more and more of this lately in Boystown. At lunch today at Las Mananitas on Halsted, a gay man and a woman had a little girl with them who was about 3 or 4, and she screamed bloody murder from the moment she sat down in the chair at the table next to us. Screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. It was like lunch with Liza Minnelli on a day with no prescription refills.
The woman completely ignored the little girl, who was seated right next to her (we just kept thinking how lucky that kid was that she wasn’t Christina Crawford). It was like the woman was deaf, or on drugs, or both — she totally pretended the little girl wasn’t even there. We know we didn’t imagine her, because (1) when we imagine things, they usually look a lot more like Jake Gyllenhaal in his Jarhead Santa Hat and little thong and (2) other people in the restaurant heard the screaming as clear as day (just not the little girl’s “parents”).
The man, who we still assume was either the father or an uncle, made all sorts of goofy faces and kept trying to make the little girl laugh (her name was, of course, something like Isabella or Isadora or Enchantrella…something multi-syllabic and vaguely foreign…a favorite of yuppies or guppies when naming kids). ”Oh, Isabella, oh bella, lookit the monkey face! Lookit the clowny face! Lookit Isabella! Lookit!”.
First of all, that monkey face business is just racist. RAAAAAACIST! And “clowny face” is homophobic, because, what, just because you are eating in a restaurant in a gay neighborhood we all need to be clowns to entertain a screaming preschooler? HOMOPHOOOOOOOBIC! And, thirdly, who outside of Cleveland says “lookit”?
The restaurant was busy. We were seated and ordered before Isabella and her entourage came into the restaurant. The food took much longer to come out than normal and all the waiters looked frazzled, so it felt like the kitchen was having trouble keeping up with all the extra tables the combination of a nice day + a large patio + crowds coming back from the Air and Water Show caused. Our opinion on a restaurant is that if you want fast food and are the kind of person who complains about how long things take, you should just eat at McDonald’s (or stay your ass home and cook). And don’t ever go to a gay restaurant if you only have 30 minutes to eat. Honey, you won’t get your drinks in 30 minutes. Maybe, if you’re lucky, in that time you might, just MIGHT, meet your waiter (before he disappears for a while to parts unknown). That’s why they have stacks of magazines and local weekly papers at the door of every restaurant in Boystown…you need the reading material while you wait.
Please.
So, it was hilarious to us that Isabella’s entourage started complaining, very rudely, that they hadn’t gotten their food yet. And they ordered after us. It felt like forever, but they had only been waiting for about 15 minutes.
But, there’s something about having a kid with them that makes people in Boystown act like they’re the center of the universe. We really wanted to ask that man if he was Isabella’s father because that might have explained it — maybe he felt so much like Superman because he was a gay man who had a kid that he thought he could behave any way he wanted (Lookit me, I made a baby! I am MAGIC!), and could be as demanding as he wanted, with complete disregard for everyone around him. For one thing, when we’re in a restaurant, we try not to disturb the people around us. There’s no screaming in public…no laughing or talking too loudly either (not even Panda, our friend who has a voice and laugh that make people want to kill themselves, like that’s his sick, horrific superpower). And we pay attention to the tables around us to make sure we’re not doing anything to drive people crazy or offend them. We also notice who around us has gotten their food and who’s still waiting and who ordered after us and who didn’t (always keeping an eye out for Oprah, too, because we don’t want to lose any limbs should that particular local Charybdis catch the scent of any enchiladas verdes suiza and rampage through the room).
It’s just so alien to us for someone to sit at a table with a screaming child, doing nothing to mitigate the screaming effectively, and then complain about anything.
So, we wonder if it’s ever appropriate to say something to a parent whose child is screaming its head off. Can you ask the parent what’s wrong or if there’s anything anyone else in the restaurant can do to help stop the screaming? We instinctively know TELLING someone to take the child outside or calm Isabella down would just start a fight. No one wants to be TOLD what to do with their precious miracle child.
But, have you ever effectively shamed someone into doing the right thing and taking the child outside to calm down? What did you say to achieve that?
Not addressing Isabella’s screaming, Sebastian (who was closest to Isabella’s father), did lean over and tell the guy he was out of line being so nasty to the waiter, reminding him that we had ordered long before his table did and we didn’t have our food either. It was a busy Saturday, and being nasty to the waiter wasn’t going to make anything come out faster, Mary.
You should have seen the look that guy gave Sebastian! If he got that defensive being called out for abusing the waiter, just imagine how crazed he would have been if his parenting skills were questioned.
What do you think? How do you handle situations like this when eating out?
Question of the Week: Who Is Against American Energy Independence?
Here’s something that fascinates us and, we believe, warrants an in-depth discussion: who is against American energy independence?
Frequently, we hear people talk about all the potential for harvesting the energy that sits under our Atlantic coast, in the Gulf, or in Alaska. We even hear stories about oil and gas reserves in unexpected places like upstate New York or Ohio. Then there’s tidal and wind energy projects like the one in Massachusetts that the Kennedy Family personally keeps stalling. The ethanol lobby from the corn-producing states has its hands deep in this mess as well.
Doesn’t it puzzle you that a nation with so much energy producing potential remains beholden to foreign oil and gas interests?
Who exactly are the players working against American energy independence?
We don’t really need to ask WHY, because without even knowing who’s involved the answer is money. The answer’s always money. So that’s the first clue: who is making the most money off the status quo, and who benefits the most from using the Liberal left to clog any attempts to harvest our national energy reserves?
Let’s use this upcoming week to think about this question, and see what we can come up with.
The End of Boystown As We Know It: A Lesson In Economic Stimulus Spending
There’s something interesting brewing here in Boystown that the Liberals in charge of Chicago never once saw coming: a serious backlash against The Center on Halsted, the gorgeous community center built (with a Whole Foods attached!) at the corner of Halsted and Waveland in Boystown.
We’ve lived in Boystown for about 5 years now — spanning the time the Center on Halsted was just a vacant lot, through its construction, and now in all its glory. We remember the signs placed all around the construction site a few years ago, with the architectural depictions of how beautiful the building would be, complete with all the exciting prose about how fabulous the Center would be in terms of programming and what it would offer the community. It was billed as the greatest community center in any gay neighborhood in the country, if not the world. In many ways, the Center does live up to its billing.
The building itself is marvelous…but it’s a lot of empty space. There’s a rooftop garden (The Mayor Daley Garden) that is one of Boystown’s secret treasures: it is a quiet, beautiful, little place on the Center’s third floor where hardly anyone’s ever there. We like to go up there on a nice day and read a book, or look out onto Halsted and watch all the people go by three stories below. It’s a great space where there are also a lot of private parties, fundraisers, etc. But, you wouldn’t necessarily know this is there unless you explored the Center.
The same thing’s true for the basketball/volleyball courts they have there, which also seem rarely used. There’s a computer room that’s supposedly open for the public, but it’s always locked up every time we’ve been there. On the second floor there’s a Senior Reading Room that’s also closed most of the time. There’s a long hallway, also on the second floor, with drawings on the walls that’s called ‘The Art Gallery” with tables and chairs and a couch people sleep on during the day. Occasionally, if you pop into one of the bathrooms, you’ll also run into guys in jockstraps posing for professional photographers, randomly (have encountered this about a half dozen times, without warning).
On the ground floor there’s a big open area where people who’ve bought things from Whole Foods eat lunch. This is the Whole Foods they used for supplies on Top Chef Chicago. Often, we get a scoop of gelato there and then pick up the local LGBTQ Chicago publications and read them at the Center in this big room.
There are events at the Center, like different speakers and various comedy or musical shows at the theater they have up on the third floor. But, really, it feels more like a place to hang out when you have nowhere else to go or nothing better to do. In the end, is that worth all the money spent on this project, or all the money that goes into it’s upkeep?
The Center replaced an eyesore vacant lot and a few nasty buildings torn down to build it and the Whole Foods next door. Jobs were created for the construction and jobs are still there running the building. And that’s all good. But, did building this Center really stimulate the local economy and make the neighborhood better?
The jury is really out on that, in terms of what’s been happening to Boystown lately.
Because the Center is such an attractive place to hang out when you have nowhere better to go, people have been coming to the Center from far away to congregate and loiter outside. As soon as the Center opened, we noticed the neighborhood immediately got rougher. When there was a vacant lot at the corner of Waveland and Halsted, we never saw large groups of teens and people in their early 20s standing on the street corner, being loud, and harassing people trying to walk by. Now that the Center’s there, that’s what people do. It spills out right from the Center’s doors, around the corner, and up Waveland to where the Center’s parking garage entrance is.
What perplexes the Liberals in the neighborhood is that these are mainly black youth loitering in front of the Center, shouting at people, trying to start fights, Voguing, and generally carrying on like absolute fools at all hours of the day and night. Liberals never can call black people out on bad behavior because they’re terrified of being called RAAAAACISTS!. And black people know this, and use this to their advantage. People are, thus, coming from the Southside and Humboldt Park to make trouble in Boystown, using the Center on Halsted as their base of operations.
Since the spring, the trouble’s increased from just nuisance Voguing on the street and shouting at or otherwise harassing people who live in the neighborhood to actually moving in gangs to rob people in Boystown at night. What seems to be happening is that people are coming to Boystown from the Southside, hanging out at the Center during the day, then waiting until it gets dark to break off into groups of 3-4 people (mostly black, with the occasional Hispanic) to walk down the side streets in Boystown looking for any young white guys walking home alone from the bars. Then, they jump the guy, take his wallet, phone, or whatever, and head back to the Center to regroup and repeat this again and again. Even when the Center’s closed, they still hang out in front, causing whatever mischief they can.
If groups of white people went into black neighborhoods and robbed young black guys, that would of course be called a racial hate crime and Al Sharpton, Henry Gates, Eric Holder, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, and James Clyburne would be falling all over themselves in their rush to get on the news condemning everyone involved. When it’s groups of black people coming from the other side of town to hunt Boystown in packs looking for white, gay victims, it’s another story altogether.
Clearly, what’s happening is that criminals in the black community have discovered a fertile hunting ground in Boystown where they can operate with relative impunity. The Center on Halsted facilitates their activities, giving them a place to meet, washrooms to use, and essentially a clubhouse, while they do whatever it is they need to do to prep for nights of racially-targeted crime in the gay community. They’re ingenious because gay Liberals are not only so terrified of being called RAAAACISTS! for speaking out against anything black people do, but they’re also scared of speaking out against The Center on Halsted, because it’s supposed to be the sparkling gem of the community.
In the end, what impact did The Center on Halsted really have on Boystown?
Do the Center’s positive attributes (the rooftop garden, the Whole Foods, the theater, the fundraising and lecture space) outweigh the crime the Center’s encouraged in Boystown and the roaming gangs of Southside toughs it attracts (which never came this far North before the Center was built)?
That reminds us of churches that build soup kitchens or homeless shelters on their property, which does good for the people they serve, but then the people they serve use the neighborhood as their new hunting ground to commit crimes there because of the convenience of the geography. They’re attracted to the soup kitchen, and then prey on the people who live in the neighborhood they’ve now been attracted to. But, when the soup kitchen was being built, all anyone could talk about was how wonderful it would be, and how pretty the building was going to be, and how it was such an investment in the community. An investment that ultimately produces more crime than new jobs or other tangible benefits to the people who lived there.
Twenty five years ago Boystown was a mess.
It was crime-ridden, with boarded up buildings, the kind of place no one wanted to live and certainly not a place where anyone would want to go out for a good time. But, the LGBTQ community invested in Boystown, building great bars, restaurants, stores, and taking over abandoned and derelict buildings and gentrifying them. We consider ourselves lucky to have moved here at what now appears to be the peak of Boystown in all its glory — which, ironically, appears to coincide with the Center on Halsted’s opening.
We have no idea what’s going on, but guess it’s a collection of a lot of things. Stores on Halsted have been closing, which is purely economy-related. DVD stores all over Chicago are going out of business because people have stopped going out for videos. Little, junky knickknack, novelty shops are closing because people don’t seem to have money to waste on little trinkets like that anymore. Other shops on the high end that sold overpriced flowers, lamps, vases, or other expensive home goods are also going out of business, too, as once again people don’t have the money to throw away on things like that anymore. The bars down Halsted aren’t as packed as they used to be, despite almost every one of them offering some kind of “Economic Stimulus” $1 well drink night or other gimick.
It feels like 4am on West Egg island, where the music’s still playing and champagne corks are still popping, just not as exuberantly as before.
Maybe we should have always been looking over our shoulders when walking home late at night, but Boystown used to feel so safe. The people out late at night seemed like they were out looking for a good time, laughing and smiling, not skulking in the dark looking for people to rob. We find ourselves walking more quickly when it’s dark out, instead of rambling along like we used to looking at all the beautiful gardens and impressive buildings in the neighborhood. It’s sad, because one of the great draws of Boystown, for us, was how safe we always felt here. Coming from Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Rochester, cities like that, we grew up always aware of the fact we could be jumped for being gay — not necessarily robbed, but beaten up by hateful idiots in Ohio or Pennsylvania or upstate New York.
And then we moved to Chicago and for the first time in our lives were able to relax and let down our guard and feel safe.
But, now, it feels like almost every night someone’s being robbed in the neighborhood — and it is always by groups of 3-4 black thugs who don’t live around here, but come here to hunt and prey on young guys whose main fault is feeling safe and letting their guard down in the neighborhood they moved to in the first place to feel safe and let their guard down.
But, if you note the muggers are all black, you are a RAAAAACIST! Remember, this is a liberal enclave, so that’s how things work. It’s like on Buffy, where everyone in Sunnydale would pretend the attacks on people weren’t really vampires. Because no one wanted to admit vampires were real. And here in Boystown no one wants to admit the Center on Halsted attracts black thugs from other parts of the city to come to our neighborhood and attack white gay guys.
It’s ridiculous. And, unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse because people are in such denial.
Though, surprisingly enough, there have been community meetings here where people did stand up and make the link between the thugs who loiter outside the Center and the increase in crime in Boystown. These people are, without fail, shouted down by the Sunnydale Liberals who want to pretend none of this is happening. There’s talking of starting “Pink Posses” to walk the neighborhoods at night with whistles to discourage crime in the sidestreets off Halsted. Would that actually work? We have no idea, but all those guys in pink with whistles would be nine shades of ridiculous.
What seems like it would work would be police or cameras installed permanently at the Center on Halsted to make it that much less attractive a place for criminals to congregate. But that would require admitting the building that was supposed to stimulate the local economy and do all sorts of positive things for the community is actually inadvertantly facilitating all this recent crime. The high unemployment (16% realistically in Chicago) and poor economy is clearly driving the crime…but the Center’s offering a creative place for criminals to camp out and coordinate their hits.
It makes us wonder how many other “stimulus projects” out there are having, or will have, unintended negative consequences like this. These are projects that Liberals make difficult to question without being called a RAAAAACIST! or a HOMOPHOOOOOOBE! or something else ridiculous — because that’s what Liberals do when anyone questions the logic or reasoning behing anything Liberals want to do. We don’t remember anyone criticizing the Center on Halsted when it was in its planning stages — and it certainly didn’t occur to us that building this Center would attract criminals from the Southside who would completely change the feel of the neighborhood. We never saw that coming.
So, we wonder, what else don’t any of us see coming in the years ahead? The current administration forced through one trillion dollars in spending for Democrats’ pet projects all across the country, under the guise of “economic stimulus”.
How many of those projects will end up facilitating crime like the Center on Halsted does?
How many will end up costing millions more than they are worth in the long run?
How many will created more problems than they were designed to solve?
How many communities will be better off than they were before the buildings were built and the fancy ribbons were cut?
Because if it’s happening in the rarefied and relatively well-off world of Boystown, then it could easily be happening soon in your town as well.
Chicago City Government Closed Tomorrow — Yet City Still Claims It Can Afford 2016 Olympics
Here’s something interesting: tomorrow the City of Chicago is enacting a “reduced service day”, where everything administrative in the City shuts down to save money. Local media report the City saves $2.5 million per day for every “reduced service day” it enacts. There are plans to have 15 of these “reduced service days” in 2010, where the libraries, city health clinics, City Hall, and every non-essential, non-emergency service is shut down to save money.
This brings up a lot of questions for us.
For starters, it feels like the City has a lot of fat it can trim from the payroll so that it doesn’t have to shut EVERYTHING down for a whole day every once in a while. We’ve worked on projects for the City, and many people collecting checks from the government don’t do any actual work. There are people whose parents are political Ward Captains and other kinds of operatives in the Daley Machine who sit at a desk and read the newspaper all day. One friend of ours who works for the City has one of these “legacy” workers assigned to her team. His father is a well-known member of the black community loyal to Mayor Daley. So, the son collects a very large salary to sit on his legacy butt during the day, reading magazines, never doing any of the work he’s supposed to do. Our friend can’t say a word about him. His performance reviews are filled out by someone above her. He takes up space in her department and is technically on the books as being part of her team, but he’s free to do as he pleases, collecting big City checks.
How many of these guys are on the payroll?
How many other jobs out there are redundant, particularly in the Parks Department, where City workers are notorious for taking a crew of six guys out to dig a hole: one guy with a shovel, three guys leaning against the truck to keep it from flying away, another guy to supervise the shoveler, and a final guy to make sure the three guys holding down the truck don’t fly away with the truck.
We wish we were kidding, but this is all true.
Has a large Democrat-controlled city government ever been properly audited for graft, fraud, and scams like this? It feels like the City would be auditing itself, and we all should know what the result of that would be.
It also feels like the City could very easily get away with “reduced service days” every Monday. If they can do it tomorrow and the world won’t end, then they could very likely do it next Monday too, with similar results. Why can’t the City government run on just 4 days a week? The City has already outsourced its parking ticket collections to a private firm. The City’s parking lots are largely in private hands as well. So the revenue-generating arms of the City are already privatized. Whatever papers need to be pushed at City Hall sure feel like they can wait until Tuesday. So why not save $2.5 million every Monday?
But, we all know that’s not going to happen — so what about the Olympics?
During Market Days weekend (the street festival here in Boystown at the beginning of August), the “Support the Bid” people had a booth at the festival encouraging Chicagoans to abandon their suspicions and doubts and embrace the Chicago Olympics bid. The bottom line is this: barring some sort of miracle that saves Rio, Chicago will indeed be chosen as the site of the 2016 Games. It’s between us and Rio.
The IOC wants desperately to give the Games to Rio, because South America is the only inhabited continent besides Africa to never host the Games. For the longest time, we thought it would be crime that kept the IOC from giving the Games to Rio. Large swaths of the city are not under government control, with gangs of street criminals preying on anyone who wanders too far away from the private-security-patrolled tourist traps like Copacabana. Chicago has crime, too, but nothing like the gangs of feral children and teens who murder people in the streets. You’ll get mugged in Chicago, by 3-4 big guys up to no good, but you most likely will survive the attack with your life and all your limbs. Not so in Rio.
But, interestingly, Chicago’s been using another weapon entirely against Rio.
The “Support the Bid” people passed out little fliers emphasizing Chicago’s transportation grid and how athletes will be able to reach any venue within 15 minutes for the Chicago 2016 Games. Apparently, this is the biggest complaint of the athletes at any Games: they do not like to sit in cars waiting to get to a venue. Apparently, they stretch and prep at the Athlete’s Village and then feel like they cramp up and lose potential every minute they are in a car heading to the venue. In Rio, the streets are Byzantine and congested, with twists and turns and no straight routes anywhere. It will take an hour or more, according to the “Support the Bid” people, to get from the Athlete’s Village to various venues around Rio. There is absolutely no hope for Rio to fix its transportation problems by 2016. The city is built around large, beautiful mountains and staggered on various scenic hills. All wonderful for postcards, but not so great for transporting athletes.
So, it really is ingenious of the “Support the Bid” people to employ transportation needs against the Rio bid. The crime issue was bringing up too much emotion, especially considering the fact its CHILDREN in Rio that are robbing and murdering people in large packs. Arguments were being made that Olympics investment could give these children a better future and maybe then they wouldn’t have to be part of these feral packs (people are naive and crazy to think the Olympics will reduce crime in any way, but the IOC is indeed naive and crazy on so many levels). But, transportation has no emotional connection to it. Either athletes can get to venues in 15 minutes, or they can’t. It’s as simple as that.
And there really is no way Rio can complete with Chicago in terms of transportation. It’s one of the easiest major cities in the world to navigate in. Our rail and bus system, though imperfect, is light years ahead of Rio’s. For the most part, you can go almost anywhere in the city without being robbed or murdered. Almost.
But, if the City is having so many money problems in 2009, and if things are only going to get worse before they get any better in terms of the economy, then how on Earth is the City going to actually pay for the Olympics in 2016? The “Support the Bid” people claim “billions in federal transportation dollars” are going to flood Chicago once we secure the bid in October. If you don’t realize by now that 80% of that money will go towards graft and corruption, you have not been paying any attention. Sure, Democrats in Congress will send all that tax money to Chicago through Ray LaHood at the Department of Transportation, but little of it will actually create any improvements in the city. Most of it will be lost to nebulous “construction studies”, “environmental impact studies”, PR efforts, and other “mistakes” so common with federally funded infrastructure projects (like the “wrong” machines or materials being ordered, or pipes being cut the wrong length, or some error in the concrete pouring that means all of it has to be torn up and redone again…and again…and again). Someone could spend a lifetime studying the waste and corruption built into federally-funded infrastructure projects and never be able to get a firm grasp on where, exactly, all that tax money really goes when it rains down upon a city like Chicago from Washington.
So, a lot of shady people connected to Mayor Daley are going to get very, very rich off these Olympics projects. The “Support the Bid” people trumpet the fact that 90% of what’s planned to be built for the Olympics are “temporary structures” that will be torn down after the Games end.
We have very mixed feelings about “temporary structures”.
On one hand, that feels like a colossal waste of money — to spend billions tearing up parks and building Olympics structures, just to rip them all down after the Games and dump all that construction material into a landfill somewhere. That feels wrong on so many levels, especially coming from Democrats who claim they are so environmentally conscious.
But, look at Beijing and the problems they’re having barely a year later with all the grandiose buildings they constructed for their Games. The “Bird’s Nest” is an empty shell that’s being used as a bargain flea market. The spectacular “Water Cube” isn’t being maintained properly, and is slowly moldering and mildewing from neglect. It’s like these magical buildings floated down from the sky and now sit abandoned by people who have no idea whatsoever what to do with them all.
And it costs millions and millions of dollars a year to keep those buildings from collapsing into complete ruin.
So, maybe it isn’t really as wasteful, in the long run, to build temporary structures for these games. The “Support the Bid” people claim new tennis courts near Boystown will be left after the Games, along with a white water rafting course that will be built on the ruins of Miegs Field airport near downtown (a small private airport Mayor Daley wanted to get rid of for years, so right after 9/11 he declared it a public hazard and had bulldozers gut large X’s up and down the runway in the middle of the night to kill Miegs…when private planes were still in the hangers and were, thus, unable to fly away so they had to be loaded onto boats and flatbed trucks at owners’ expense…which still ranks as one of the ballsiest and craziest things Mayor Daley has ever done in Chicago). Supposedly, an Olympics pool complex will also be left for Chicagoans to enjoy…though, just like Beijing, the cost of upkeeping that will be astronomical (when the City already has an awful lot of community pools, not to mention a lake with many public beaches in nice weather).
The “Support the Bid” people also claim the City will make billions of dollars in tourist traffic to Chicago because of the Olympics. Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense where all these tourists are supposed to come from or what, exactly, the Olympics is going to do to bring them here. Beijing built awe-inspiring architectural projects that people still go to China to see a year later. But, if Chicago’s bid is based around temporary structures, what exactly will people be flocking to Chicago to see when the Olympics are over? Chicago itself is a remarkable city that’s always a joy to see — but how will the Olympics convince people to make Chicago a vacation destination if they don’t know that already? Sydney and Atlanta didn’t build anything monumental for their Olympics Games — did those cities receive massive tourist boosts after their Games to justify all the spending? How many people dream about going to Georgia to see Centennial Park? More likely, they go for World of Coke or the truly stupendous and awesome Georgia Aquarium (the absolute best aquarium we have ever been to). How much does the fact Atlanta hosted the Olympics in 1996 impact someone’s decision to go there? How long after the Olympics did Europeans, Asians, and South Americans forget about Atlanta? Because, supposedly, the big point in hosting the Games is to get a city on the cultural radar for people who only think of the United States as New York, Los Angeles, Washington, or maybe Miami.
Living in Chicago in these last days before we win the Olympics bid feels like watching a good friend sign a bad mortgage deal we know will blow up in her face. The lender is promising her all these nebulous, magical benefits we know will never come true, and we try to tell her the money she’s shelling out just isn’t worth it in the long run, but she’s got stars in her eyes and we know there’s nothing we can say or do that can stop her. So, this person we care deeply about is on a collision course with mild disaster and all we can do is watch it happen.
Chicago will get the 2016 Games.
Chicago will not be able to pay for them.
Chicago will not see the return on its investment that the “Support the Bid” people claim.
Chicago will indeed put on one Hell of a party in 2016…and it will be absolute Hell to live in the City for two weeks before the Games, during the two weeks of the Games, and during the two weeks after the Games.
And then, after that, it’s going to be one long, painful Olympics hangover.
How many “reduced service days” will the City need to recover from that?
Sunday Open Thread, August 16th 2009
What’s on your mind this Sunday?
Today’s one of those days when we need a boost…and find one in a “Hillary song” rearranged via the upcoming FOX show Glee. We can watch this over and over and over again, thinking about that early campaign commercial, but also thinking about that midnight train to anywhere…some are born to win, some born to lose, some to sing the blues…but you just don’t stop believing. Oh-o-o-o-aaaa.
Here’s another thing that makes us think: iPod distraction causes deadly crash in Texas. We wonder if anyone’s keeping track of injuries and fatalities involving pedestrians’ use of iPods. Here in Chicago, for some reason, we see at least one woman a week who comes very close to being hit by a car because she’s in another world listening to her iPod. Every time we’ve seen this, it’s been a woman…just wandering in the street, crossing on a green light, paying no attention whatsoever to the world around her…and then HONK!, SCREECH!, she’s almost run over. Worse yet, she continues wandering and bebopping not even realizing she was just almost run over. We’ve seen men on the running paths by the lake slam into other people and guys on bikes wipe out when they’re lost in the iPod alternate universe, but have yet to see a guy wander in the street oblivious to traffic with his iPod on. We’re sure it happens…but have not seen it yet. It’s interesting to wonder if that’s anomalous for women here in our neighborhood in Chicago, and just how many people are injured, in any form, while using Ipods every year.
