Archive for May, 2010
America Will Be Saved By Moms and Other Awesome Women
Just an observation — but as our current effete and blundering socialist president tanks our economy, insults our friends and allies, and bows and cowers before Islam and our other foreign enemies, it’s amazing to see the American Resistance to anti-exceptionalism coalesce around a valkyrie brigade of tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners, get-it-done, God-Bless-America, moms and other awesome women.
Sarah Palin, our nation’s greatest hope, Momma Grizzly in Chief.
Michele Bachmann, who should be our next Speaker of the House.
Liz Cheney, firebrand and truthteller.
Jan Brewer, the most courageous member of the GOP, standing up to Liberalism and protecting her people the way no man before her had the guts to do.
Nikki Haley, who should be the next Governor of South Carolina.
Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Mercy Otis Warren, and Betsy Ross would be very proud indeed.
When America needs it most, the ladies are answering that clarion call.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, John Thune, Jon Hunstman, Mitch Daniels, and the other wimpy men the Lamestream Media keeps trying to foist upon us as the 2012 GOP nominee are gathered at a lacy-tableclothed table, sipping lukewarm tea and eating soggy cucumbers-and-mayonnaise sandwiches discussing ways they could bend over more flexibly and serve as further appeasement to this president and the insane things he’s hellbent on doing to our nation. ”Pass the skim milk, my tea is too hot,” Romney whispers. “Don’t burn yourself, tea can be very dangerous. Sometimes, I blow on my tea to make it safe for me to drink, and then I sip it,” cautions Pawlenty. “Can you show me how to do that, I don’t want to burn myself. I already took too big of a bite of my sandwich and I almost couldn’t swallow it!”, exclaimed Thune. ”We sure are a lot of wimpy, lame, boring-as-Hell, little do-nothings, aren’t we?”, realistically appraised Daniels.
We sure won’t disagree with that.
What other women should we add to our list of new American heroes, who you think are really doing their part on the national scene to save this nation?
Who Would You Rather Get A Visit From? Jessica Fletcher, or Obama?
H/t Tammy Bruce for the Murder She Wrote reference
Whose presence causes less pain and suffering on visits?
Who brings less chaos and trouble with them wherever they go?
Who would you rather get a visit from?
Monday Open Thread: May 24th, 2010
What’s on your mind this Monday?
What are people talking about in your neighborhood?
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Great Merciful Zeus: Are people finally waking up to what Islam really is? New Sex and the City film universally described as eye cancer.
We’ve talked before about how bizarre it is that the Sex and the City girls are heading to Abu Dabi in the new movie, to do their thing where they talk about sex at the breakfast table, wear almost no clothing in public, drink excessively and make bad decisions, then laugh about it all. With puns.
But, they want to do all these things in the Middle East…under the crescent shadow of Islam.
Seriously?
What parallel dimension are they vacationing in, because in the real Middle East, visiting Western women would not be applauded for behaving the way Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and the mean-spirited redhead always do. They’d be raped, most likely, then arrested for enticing men to rape them, then probably raped some more before being made into chattel. Such is the way of Islam, not only The Religion of Peace, the Religion of Ultimate Fairness and Respect For Both Women and Gay Men.
Which are the only people on Earth who would ever watch a Sex and the City movie, of their own volition. So, why send these characters back in time to the oppressive, deranged, mysognistic and virulently-homophobic realm of Islam?
Makes no sense.
And neither does the latest movie, apparently. From the sound of it, not even Robby’s sister Ann-Louise is going to like this flotsam. And that girl alternatively claims to actually BE either the real life inspiration for Carrie or Samantha, or both. Nobody on Earth would believe she’d inspire Charlotte…and we’ve yet to meet anyone who willingly cops to being killjoy Miranda.
Sounds like a major stinkfest of a film.
CURIOUS: Do you care at all that "Lost" is ending tonight?
This is very interesting to us, because there are a lot of “Lost” parties going on all around Chicago. We’ve been invited, but chose instead to stay home and get caught up on a lot of writing we didn’t have time for this week because of work. Some of the parties sound fun — with castaway themes. We know a few drag queens who are going as Ginger and Maryann, which was Gilligan’s Island, and not lost, but both are much more fun to dress up as than a polar bear or smoke monster.
We watched the first season of Lost.
We also remember Sebastian’s ex David was really, really into the show and used to watch it sitting on the floor, mumbling, rewinding the TIVO to catch bits he missed and play episodes over and over again. But, David was heavily abusing vicodin and other prescriptions at the time, so he behaved that way watching a Friskies commercial.
There are some shows we care monumentally about and will love forever — like Ugly Betty, Buffy, Arrested Development, Better Off Ted, Alias (before it got stupid), Misfits of Science, Jem, Dynasty, and Sliders, all because they either mean something to us, were incredibly cool, or we used to watch them with great friends who loved them as well (total Abbey shoutout, y’all).
99% of what’s on the air, though: meh.
We’ll have it playing on Hulu or Netflix while we do other things on the computer, like right now, with Murder She Wrote randomly on…but we’re not even watching the picture, just listening to it like the radio. Otherwise, we hear the birds out the window squabbling and can hear all the 100 clocks here at Buzzquarters ticking, ticking, tocking…and that’s when redrum redrum redrum redrum inadvertently starts filling up the screen, like it was typed at the good old Overlook.
We really don’t care about Lost, but wondered if you did…and if you actually have any sense at all of love for television anymore.
We freely admit we used to…but 2008 changed that.
The networks were just so shamelessly pushing for Obama in our primaries against Hillary, that we finally saw the media and Hollywood for the agenda-driven fools that they are. We got rid of our TVs in the summer of 2009, and it was one of our best decisions ever. Today, being Sunday, a few years ago we probably would have gone to see a movie and would be parked in front of a TV now waiting for junk to come on, but instead we read, wrote, enjoyed the outdoors, and didn’t give any of our time or money to Hollywood.
None of this was intentional, but it’s part of something bigger that’s happened to all of us without us even realizing it in the last two years.
We were once as committed to TV-watching as we were to the Democrat party, but the DNC and the networks both let their masks slip in what they did to Hillary Clinton…and that changed us for good it seems.
Strange this all comes out in regards to something like Lost and its finale viewing parties, but there it is.
We do admit, however, to wondering what exactly the mysteries of this show ended up being…and what the island really is, so if anyone watches and wants to spoil it for us, we’d kind of love that so we never have to watch the finale for ourselves.
What's left after the After School Specials? Pie Hole Pizza Joint's demise teaches a lesson about Liberalism's ruinous impact on small businesses
Boystown’s heart is the intersection of Roscoe and Halsted, where three ramshackle Victorian sisters occupy every corner that’s not a random, jarring 7-11 parking lot.
The gaudiest of these disheveled painted ladies is home to Roscoe’s, a dance, karaoke, and neighborhood-style bar (that’s also sometimes a surprisingly good outdoor cafe) decorated with more kitsch and flare than a suburban office park Chotchkie’s in a Mike Judge wet dream. Across the perennially car-lined, tree shaded street that is Roscoe, there’s the dirty gray building housing rainbow-fabulous Beatnix, boasting the best window displays in Chicago — it’s part vintage clothing store, all-year-round costume shop, drag emporium, and galactic Lost & Found, dolled up with the kind of stop-in-your-tracks-and-gape-mouth-wide-open imaginative fenestrations Andrew McCarthy allegedly concocted with Kim Cattrall at Prince & Company in the greatest movie ever made (aka, 1987′s Mannequin…R.I.P. Miss Estelle Getty, we miss you Sophia). Only, these window displays really are, more often than not, actually AMAZING (as opposed to the lackluster cinematic windows paid extras were directed to ooooo and aaaaaah over). Then, diagonally across Halsted from Beatnix, in half of a boxy, old, turreted brick building that’s the butchest of the Three Sisters, the Rosie, there’s the identity-crisis suffering go-go bar Cocktail (which can never seem to make up its mind if it’s trying to give MiniBar a run for its douchebag-attracting, pretentious money, or if it’s maybe channeling Lucky Horseshoe’s seedy stripper charm, or if it wants to be laid-back posh cool like Scarlet, or if it wants to be a less-cluttered neighborhoody bar like Roscoe’s across the street, but with no bird houses, busts of Athena, popcorn machines, or other flare in sight).
The other half of Rosie, not yet taken over by Cocktail, for many years belonged to Pie Hole Pizza Joint — the veritable SOUL of Boystown.
As we’ve told you repeatedly, we absolutely love this place, and have loved it since we each individually moved to Chicago and discovered it on our own, in our own ways (first dates, clever ads in local LGBTQ papers, accidental encounters after a night at Sidetracks, or Panda’s uncanny ability to sniff delicious pizza from a tri-state radius, like hound dogs detecting truffles or Oprah zeroing in on that lost M&M in your purse, from a full time zone away). All of us here at HillBuzz became friends during the 2008 campaign, and some of us, in fact, met for the very first time over slices of Pie Hole’s After School Special sausage-and-marshmallow pizza while working phone banks in Boystown for Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign. That’s how Panda, in fact, entered our lives, arriving late and out of breath at our door one random Saturday in January, huffing and puffing after climbing three flights of stairs to our landing, carrying a giant Pie Hole box in his mittened hands, complaining about squirrels outside who were “plotting against him” (don’t ask). On Tuesdays, as our friendships developed, we’d have late-night strategy sessions planning our next road trip for Hillary, with MSNBC, CNN, and Fox playing on different TVs setup in our makeshift war room, stacks of canvassing data and call scripts everywhere, and we’d call Pie Hole for their Drag Delivery…where a Miss Foozie pineapple-and-ham pizza would be delivered to Buzzquarters by a dressed-to-the-nines sparkle and sass drag queen (a one time Pie Hole standout tradition). THAT was always a refreshing and uplifting sight after staring at Tim Russert or Chris Matthews’ porcine, cheesy mugs for far too long in the early days of this site. After pub crawls and volunteer drives in the neighborhood, first for Hillary, and then later for McCain/Palin once we started Democrats for McCain efforts here in Boystown, we’d decompress at Pie Hole late at night, comparing notes and working on rough drafts for pieces here on HillBuzz, over pieces of whatever creative monthly themed special Pie Hole was running (like Thanksgiving Dinner pizza in November, complete with gravy, turkey, mashed potatoes, craisins, and basil…or the unforgettable Christmas Pizza, with cinnamon BBQ sauce, ham, sweet potatoes, and marshmallows).
We loved the funky vibe of the Pie Hole, with the exposed brick, the gleaming metal heating and cooling ducts crisscrossing the ceiling (often decorated with colorful lights marking whatever holiday was coming, even if it was a very Boystown-specific one like “Whitney Houston’s Birthday”…August 9th, as if we have to tell you that), the cartoonish portraits of random queens on the wall, and a lively and eclectic staff straight out of central casting for a must-watch reality show (that, if there was any justice in this world, would be in its eleventyeth season already). Shy little twinks worked hard behind the swinging saloon door assembling the pizzas like adorable elves in tight jeans and Threadless tees; a Pleasantville-sweet clerk named Abby was so darling she could have un-ironically worn bobby socks and poodle skirts, her ponytail tied back with yarn, more bubbly than the Jones cream soda chilling in the cooler beside the twirling display rack of individual slices; brass and vivacious Ronnie, working the counter like Nell Carter doing a bawdy set, had a voice as soothing and memorable as Earth Kitt’s and a flirty wink and smile for everyone stepping up for a slice. Everyone who worked there was a character, carrying themselves with an unforced, unconscious cool unlike any team we’d seen assembled anywhere else in Boystown. You couldn’t script a more lively and charming bunch, including Pie Hole’s owner, Doug Brandt, who appeared sporadically in blue blazer and jeans, always a little scruffy, typing on Twitter via his laptop at a corner of the long, shiny serving counter.
With a prime location, 4am liquor license, patio permit, incredible staff, and AMAZING product, it’s inconceivable to us that Pie Hole as a business could ever possibly fail — or that any building owner would not automatically want to renew the lease of a neighborhood institution as colorful, funky, original, and lively as Pie Hole. When this place became a solid, several-times-a-week, part of our lives back in 2008, we thought, if anything, it would ultimately drive Cocktail out of the building so that it could expand eastward onto Halsted and claim a storefront right on the main Boystown strip, instead of having its front door on Roscoe, off to the side, by an alley, facing the ever-enchanting 7-11 parking lot.
Instead, Pie Hole was the business forced out, as the building’s owner decided to end Doug’s lease and allow Cocktail to grow into Pie Hole’s current space. The rumor on the street was that Cocktail planned to turn Pie Hole’s slice of the building into an upscale strip club (to give an alternative to Lucky Horseshoe), but in actuality Cocktail’s going to keep the kitchen, create an outdoor patio running the full length of the building, offer late night “South Beach style dining” (whatever that is), and essentially ape MiniBar’s odd restaurant-that-transforms-into-a-club-at-certain-times-but-fails-t0-be-especially-good-at-being-a-restaurant-or-a-club-shtick. Why anyone would want to go to MiniBar, let alone make the conscious decision to emulate it, is just beyond us, especially after the owners of Cocktail ran several restaurants into the ground in the past (including one in the Caribbean), and have never really gotten a handle on figuring out what Cocktail’s supposed to be as it is.
So, it wasn’t that the building’s owner didn’t want a late night restaurant in that space, as some Pie Hole fans have claimed. It was that the owner didn’t want that restaurant to be Pie Hole anymore, and hadn’t wanted Pie Hole to remain a tenant since last summer — when an awful lot of things in Boystown really hit the fan.
It’s impossible to talk about the demise of Pie Hole without focusing on the Center on Halsted and the gangs of thugs it has brought to our neighborhood. As we’ve told you before, it is cardinal sin in the LGBTQ community to ever say either a bad word about a black person or anything good about a Republican, so whenever we speak out about the damage the Center on Halsted does to Boystown, we’re immediately attacked and we alienate many people we like very much — including Doug at Pie Hole — but we refuse to pretend the Center is the rainbow-and-sunshine-factory/unicorn stables some of the more aggressively delusional “leaders” in the community pretend it is. All evidence to the contrary.
The Center on Halsted opened its doors on June 8th, 2007 to rapturous applause for a gorgeous (and we do not use that term lightly — we mean spare-no-expense, gleaming glass, state-of-the-art, GORGEOUS) building with all manner of good intentions and nebulous purpose. Prior to the Center’s construction at the corner of Waveland and Halsted (a few blocks north of Roscoe and Halsted, as the twink skips), the space was occupied most recently by a vacant, weed-strewn lot, and before that some sort of brick garage-type buildings that were auto repair shops or tire warehouses when Al Capone was still zipping down Halsted up to the Green Mill in tours of his empire. In either of these former incarnations, that parcel of land never attracted criminals to Boystown, long before it was Boystown, who weren’t already here (and probably on Capone’s payroll). We’re sure all manner of criminal things took place inside the vacant buildings, or behind piles of dirt on the lot in the dark, but criminal enterprises never left the site.
Since 2007, the Center has served most effectively not as a community treasure or cultural jewel — or, as intended, “the heart of Boystown” — but as a crime magnet, making Boystown worse, not better.
The “Horizons Youth Program”, and other such “youth programs”, at the Center is the sort of half-baked waste of tax dollars dreamed up by Liberals at well-catered brainstorming sessions featuring plenty of vegan and cruelty-free snacking options, with copious note-taking on all the ways various subsets of people have been victimized and “need a voice”. That “voice” calls out for large amounts of public funding, to create something like Horizons, which was, of course, dubbed by some cliche naming convention involving a straw hat, slips of organically-produced recycled paper, and buzz words tossed into play by all of the “diverse community representatives” invited to the planning meeting. ”Vista”. “Empowerment”. “Tranquility”. “Energy”. “Healing”. “Snuggles”. “Vitality”. “Horizons”. By Obama, we think we’ve got it!
If you have spent any time at all on a college campus, or have ever set foot in any nonprofit, you have most likely seen jumbles of words like this haphazardly scribbled on large sheets of white meeting paper, taped to the walls as reminders of meetings much like the one that birthed the “Horizons Youth Program”. The United Nations-looking, forcibly “diverse” group of “community project advisors” usually comes up with name of something like Horizons long before it figures out what it should actually do (if ever they manage to do that), how they will pay for it, and what real impact it will have on the community. We imagine someone at a meeting like this saying something like:
“Well, if there’s a Center, we should have a youth program. And that youth program should do things for young people, because young people are the future. Teach them well, and then they can lead the way.”
“I know, we can show them all the beauty they possess inside”.
“I think we should give them a sense of pride, to make it easier”.
“Then we can let their laughter remind us of who we used to be, because everybody’s searching for a hero and people need someone to look up to”.
The chorus to this lovefest consists of the forcibly-diverse advisory board commencing a long, tearful group hug, before adjourning for another taxpayer-funded vegan lunch, with more than a few gluton-free rolls stuffed into purses or messenger bags “for later”. None of these “big thinkers” realize they’re just parroting lyrics to not just an old Whitney Houston song, but reading from the same Liberal script that’s been mimeographed and redistributed so much it’s taken as gospel in Leftist-controlled cities like Chicago. And because the Left and urban ruling elite support all of this pandering and cliche hugs-and-rainbow-unicorn platitude, anyone who stands up and questions the effectiveness or, dare we say PURPOSE, of a “Horizons Youth Program” gets the full force of the Alinsky Handbook leveled at him to crush this opposition to the neverending stream of taxpayer dollars that go to “help the children” or “give people a voice”.
The ugly fact about the beautiful Center on Halsted building is that its “youth programs” may claim to “prevent issues related to HIV/AIDS, STDs, and substance abuse, promote leadership, offer vocational/career development, recreation, and healthy self-esteem”, but in reality the Center was never really equipped to do any of these things. All of the above were items that were brainstormed by the forcibly-diverse advisory board, written in red, green, blue, and black markers on giant pieces of paper, and cobbled together as a “mission” for the Center. Before the meeting adjourned for a delicious, free lunch. No follow-up was really given to implementing all of this unicorn-breeding/rainbow-collecting in real life, because the funding for the Center was approved and everyone knew full well no one at the city, state, or federal level would ever care if youth were actually ever in reality HELPED by this program. Being able to list the program on a budget and show that money went to it was enough for Liberals to declare it a resounding success.
What really happened was this: starting in 2007, when the Center opened its doors, young thugs in the 17-20something range, who had never previously come to Boystown in large numbers, were told that the Center on Halsted was a great place to hang out. There’s a whole second floor with couches to sleep on. A Whole Foods is connected to the building with lots of things to steal — and because it would offensive to have them visible, there are no police or security guards stopping shoplifters. The Center opens early and stays open late, so it’s a convenient place for people to meet, where they will never be kicked out or challenged as to what they are doing, the way they would be in a public library or other space. The Center is also right on the strip where all the bars, restaurants, and stores are, which makes it an ideal clubhouse for those interested in getting up to mischief in a neighborhood largely devoid of thugs and mischief makers. Rent’s not anywhere near cheap in Boystown, and the people who choose to live in the neighborhood are either young professionals who work hard to be able to afford the fabulous gay lifestyle, or they are older people and retirees who want to live in a great neighborhood and enjoy it after working very hard their whole lives. So, until the Center opened in 2007, there just wasn’t an element of young hoodlums hanging around, loitering, shoplifting, spray painting, lurking on stoops and corners, mugging people, picking pockets, vandalizing property, or using bricks to put victims into the hospital.
The young professionals renting apartments in the neighborhood never did these things. The retirees in their condos never did any of this. The teenaged children of the middle-aged professionals raising their families in this neighborhood didn’t engage in this behavior.
These crimes were imported to Boystown by the Horizons Youth Program and the Center on Halsted.
The neighborhood started to change in 2007 once the Center opened, but the full impact of what was starting to happen wasn’t felt until the summer of 2008, largely because the troublemakers behind all of this don’t trudge north to commit these crimes when the weather is cold. After the Center closes, on hot summer nights, all Hell breaks loose after the “youth” the Center solicits are disgorged onto Halsted. We put “youth” in quotes here because that’s the term the Center uses for these criminals — it’s another Liberal standby, of euphemising something to make it not only more palatable, but harder to oppose. So, the people introduced to the neighborhood by the misguided Center on Halsted are “youth” instead of “criminals”, the way “an IRS audit” would be called “a fun afternoon with math” and “killer cyborgs sent by SkyNet from the future” would be deemed “silly robots”.
“Youth”, “kids”, “rascals”…never “criminals”, “delinquents”, “gang members”, “thugs”, etc. If you don’t abide by the politically-correct, Liberal-directed, media-enforced eupemistic vocabulary, then you are just a RAAACIST, because these “youth” are mostly black and admitting they’ve been the cause of going on three years’ worth of grief in Boystown is JUST. NOT. ALLOWED.
Midway through the summer of 2008, local merchants and bar owners, as well as the residents of the fancier condos in Boystown, started complaining to the police about the uptick in crime and the general nuisance caused by the thugs the Center on Halsted had been recruiting to Boystown through the Horizons program. The police hold monthly C.A.P.S. meetings (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy), which are basically just more brainstorming and buzzword generating sessions, only with doughnuts instead of vegan buffet lunches. At these meetings, the Center dispatched PR reps to howl at anyone who talked about the thugs terrorizing the neighborhood. If you talked about the “youth” assembling outside the Center when it closed, demanding money from passers-by, hooting and hollering, and lurking in the dark, you would be called a RAAACIST. If you asked why loitering statutes were not being enforced, and these “kids” were allowed to hang out on stoops — on private property — on the residential side streets off Halsted, blocking access and intimidating residents and owners, you would be scolded for being so damn RAAACIST. If you owned a business and complained about the bizarre gangs of Batman-grade transvestite shoplifters stealing from your shop in packs, you’d be branded a RAAACIST, and one with no appreciation for the theatric quality and gender-bending masterful illusion of the crimes.
In short, in Boystown if you talk about the 180 this neighborhood has taken — in a bad way — since the Center on Halsted opened, you are called a RAAACIST, told to shut up, and are personally attacked for speaking the truth.
During the warm months, when the “youth” are out in full force, the Center and its Liberal defenders downplay the crimes the “kids” are committing by doing one of two things: either, as stated above, attacking the complainants in those cases as RAAACISTS who “just don’t like black kids being in the neighborhood” or claiming the amount of police reports on these matters “isn’t really all that bad”. The problem with this line of logic is that no one is factoring into this the fact that the Liberal mindset in Boystown inherently reduces the amount of police reports that SHOULD be filed, on crimes that WERE committed, but because of either peer pressure, willful ignornance, or a determination to prove they are not RAAACIST, people don’t report what’s happened to them.
That last bit is the most interesting because we’ve actually seen that happen to people we know, who were robbed or pick-pocketed by the “kids” who hang out at the Center. We asked them if they filed police reports, and they said they didn’t, because they (1) didn’t believe the police would do anything, (2) didn’t have time to to go the police station when they figured they would just sit there and be told they were RAAACIST for complaining about the black “youth” that robbed them, (3) didn’t want others in the neighborhood to call them RAAACIST for going to the police and making a police report on a black person. That would probably mean the Left would call them Nazis too, which is the next tier in the Leftist arsenal that’s employed against someone speaking out about the “youth problem”. First, you are RAAACIST if you even acknowledge there is a serious problem. Then, if you take the step forward and start dealing with the police in terms of what’s happening, you are now a NAZI for bringing the police into it. The Left claims you are siccing the Gestapo on “those poor kids” and that you are then helping the police “pick on them”. Once, in 2009, we remember a big bruhaha caused because a patrol car stopped a group of 10-15 of these black youth and asked them why they were carrying baseball bats and bricks down a side street off Halsted — at 2 or 3am.
So, clearly, they were not on their way to a baseball game in the middle of the night. They were not gathering loose bricks to build a shelter for lost puppies, or a stable for stray unicorns. ”Kids” who are not old enough to go to the bars on Halsted, who do not live in the neighborhood, who are roaming in the dark in packs with bats and bricks are not up to any good. They are bad “kids” and the police should very much stop them, question them, and do everything they can to make those “kids” go home to wherever they live. When you personally know guys who have had their skulls bashed in by bricks in the middle of the night, we guarantee even the most Liberal amongst you might start to think it’s not at all out of the realm of reason for the police to intervene when packs of these “kids” are spotted in the middle of the night like this.
But, the problem in resolving this issue with the Center’s Horizon Youth Program is that almost all of the “kids” drawn to the Center for this program are black, and Boystown is a largely white neighborhood. Therefore, any criticism of the Center, the program, or the program’s attendees is depicted as RAAACIST by the Liberals who populate Boystown…even though Boystown residents are the ones being victimized. The Left has so conditioned gays in particular to shoot knee-jerk accusations of RAACISM at anyone criticizing the Left or black people on anything that no progress towards a solution can ever be made, because defenders of the Center and its criminal attractees drop the nuclear race-baiting charges left and right.
Word’s gotten out, however, that Boystown is not as safe as it was before the Center opened. Bar owners report the last year has been the worst in memory, though Center defenders blame that on the deep recession we’re in. What’s interesting is that bar owners we know in other parts of town, without a Center on Halsted nearby, aren’t reporting decreased sales. Restaurants in Boystown that used to be packed after sunset have empty tables. The same is not true for restaurants in other parts of town. Center defenders claim that’s just because other restaurants have opened and people are trying something new. That could be, but those restaurants were sure doing great before June 8th, 2007. Before people had to duck and weave around packs of “youth” loitering at the corners, or taking up positions in the middle of the sidewalk, hooting, hollering, screaming, yelling, fighting, pushing, and shoving in the middle of the night as paying customers tried making their way to bars or restaurants. To avoid those “kids” and their behavior, people have just started avoiding Boystown. The business and bar owners have noticed this, and keep raising the issue at those C.A.P.S. meetings, but the Center defenders keep refusing to listen…and keep making apologies for “all those poor misunderstood kids”.
This is, we hate to say, what Doug at Pie Hole did, and why his business is closing.
After we brought Pie Hole’s closing up the other day (because we were contacted by the Tribune about a story being written about this), Doug took some nasty swipes at us via Twitter and encouraged his staff and patrons to send some hatemail our way. We pictured him at his laptop doing this, the way we’ve seen him in his blazer and scruff typing furiously in the past, and we refuse to say a bad word about the man no matter what he tries to smear us with. We like Doug Brandt very much and we wish more than anything that his business was flourishing and that Pie Hole was not just a permanent Boystown institution but a successful national chain. The pizza really was THAT GOOD, people. The staff really was THAT AMAZING. Doug really is THAT NICE OF A GUY.
But, he’s Liberal to the core in his mindset when it comes to the “youth” from the Center. Ironically enough, Doug’s a Republican, but he’s got a bleeding heart and he very much subscribes to the cardinal rule of “never say a bad word about a black person, no matter what that person does”. Ever since Pie Hole’s lease renewal was declined, Doug has used the Liberal strategy of calling all those who criticized him a RAAACIST, and he has made many enemies in the community by doing this. We are now on the receiving end of this garbage from him, and we join an illustrious list of many, many people Doug has now called a RAAACIST because they’ve come to the conclusion that as much as they love Doug, love Pie Hole, and love having such a funky, cool pizza shop open late, Doug’s catering to and enabling of the criminal element the Center introduced to the neighborhood had just gone too far.
Several months ago we reached out to our readers on a nationwide scale and asked all of you to help Pie Hole in any way that you could — mainly, this took the form of sending Doug words of encouragement and various ideas for talking to the local Alderman, the Merchants’ Association, banks, attorneys, and others who could possibly help him keep his lease and save Pie Hole. We were so passionate about helping Doug and Pie Hole that we approached other business and bar owners on the street, in person, and asked them to get involved and either convince the building owner to renew Doug’s lease or to help him find another location on Halsted. There were actually, at the time, three very good spots for Pie Hole to relocate to on the strip: (1) the two side-by-side abandoned storefronts next to Hydrate night club, near Cornelia and Halsted that have been vacant since a DVD and a souvenir shop closed down years ago, (2) the abandoned building next to Roscoe’s that used to be a swimsuit store four or five years ago, and (3) the storefront that was the short-lived, failed Wally & Agador’s sandwich shop (that everyone in the neighborhood thought was a dog bakery, because the signage had weird pictures of cartoon dogs on it). That last one was turned into a new sandwich shop called “Paris in Chicago” that’s also failing, because the owner is from France and does not want to believe that Wally & Agador’s failed because it was too expensive and offered sandwiches the residents of the neighborhood did not want to buy (and so, in Gallic fashion, Jacques’ offering even MORE expensive sandwiches that no one wants to buy, and keeps staring forlorn and lonely out the windows of his shop no doubt internally mocking Chicagoans for not being gastronomically erudite enough to appreciate his genius).
The other two storefronts are still vacant, though MiniBar apparently owns the building next to Roscoe’s and keeps trying to turn it into a “brunch restaurant” it seems to want to compete with the Sunday brunch MiniBar already does in the restaurant it occasionally is when it’s not being a hangout spot for douchebags (and, of course, Aaron Schock). This is where Panda spotted what he thought were graves dug in the middle of the night once, then left uncovered, but it turned out the people digging them weren’t nervous because they were burying bodies but because MiniBar didn’t bother to get the right permits for digging in the ground. MiniBar also recently had a bunch of steel beams installed on that site, over gravel, without building a proper and secure foundation (because it could not get permits to do that, no doubt), to build a patio where we presume they would serve brunch — but then the city made them rip all those beams out because we heard it was deemed illegal and unsafe. So, we have no idea what MiniBar is up to with this project, but think maybe, perhaps, they should hire an architect, contractor, and someone adept at reading building code and the city’s permit process instructions.
We heard Doug aggressively tried to land a lease at both the abandoned gift shop and MiniBar-owned buildings but was turned down. Just like with the Cocktail expansion plans, the building owners did not object to a restaurant being in that space — just not to Pie Hole being there, because we quickly learned that the Merchants’ Association and the condo and building owners in Boystown are relieved Pie Hole is closing. The hope amongst these people is that when it closes, the “youth” imported to Boystown by the Center on Halsted will disperse and return to wherever they come from when the Center closes at night. Doug gave them an after-hours hangout place, and in the summer months, when 75-100 of these underaged “kids” would be clumped onto Doug’s patio outside Pie Hole, yelling, shouting, fighting, hooting, and hollering, any love fellow business owners had for Doug and his restaurant was lost as he refused to crack down and chase away anyone who was not a paying customer and was instead just using Pie Hole as a hangout and place to make trouble from.
Pie Hole itself as a business was not a nuisance.
Pie Hole as a privately-owned, late night Youth Outreach clubhouse was a nuisance attractor.
After Doug tweeted about our article yesterday, we got about 12 messages from his staff and a few customers arguing that “things have been better the last few months” and “the kids don’t hang out here as much now”. This is, as we’ve told you repeatedly, because the “kids” don’t come out in force when the weather is cold. Once the sun sets in the winter, and Chicago gets to be its bone-chilling self, even the most dedicated pickpockets and muggers have to put on their mittens and find someplace to keep warm. Doug’s patio at Pie Hole just doesn’t cut it, and there’s not enough room in that little pizza shop to carry on the way those groups of thugs wanted to. The hardiest of the bunch were still seen up by Spin, huddling in the nooks and crannies of that large club building up near Belmont and Halsted, or lurked in stoops and archways in the sidestreets, but just like in the winter of 2008-2009, the winter of 2009-2010 experienced a decrease in this youth presence corresponding exactly with the dramatic drop in Chicago’s temperatures.
As we’ve stated many times on this site, the prevailing fear in the community is that this is going to be a very hot, sticky, sweaty summer. We imagine as unpleasant as the temperature’s going to get in Boystown, it’s going to be even more undesirable to be wherever these youth actually live — and so they are going to follow the Center on Halsted’s siren song up to Boystown again this year, as soon as the weather gets consistently inviting, and all Hell is going to break loose once more. Doug, as he lashes out at all those who talk about this problem, claims it’s that residents don’t want black people coming to Boystown. This is not true, because Boystown is a very welcoming place to all paying customers. If you are 21 years old and have money in your pocket to buy drinks, food, and tip, you are welcome everywhere, no matter who you are, what you look like, or even how you behave. There are enough clubs on the street for everyone to have a good time, no matter whom you want to socialize with. We have, aside from the occasional drunken bar fight over something along the lines of “Has Brit-Brit totally lost it or not”, never seen any trouble in the bars — where only people 21 and over are allowed.
The trouble is 100% rooted in the “kids”, underaged, hanging out in the street at all hours of the night, once the Center on Halsted that brought them to Boystown closes. With no money, no ability to get into the bars, and nothing to do, they hoot, holler, scream, fight, harass, pickpocket, vandalize, and mug people, largely, it seems, for something to do.
Doug, CLEARLY, saw this and decided to do his part to try to give the “kids” an alternative to criminal activity.
As we’ve said numerous times, Doug is an awesome guy, and his heart is in the right place, but he was delusional to think he could keep his business and turn it into a Youth Outreach Center at the same time. Midway through 2008, it became clear to everyone in Boystown paying attention that Doug had a policy of allowing the Center gang to hang out at Pie Hole without buying anything, and that he permitted them to use his patio and restaurant as their clubhouse. Anyone who lived on Roscoe within earshot had to deal with the noise issue from this decision, while anyone trying to walk passed Pie Hole’s brick walls to get home, or walk to the bars on Halsted, had to contend with whatever the “kids” felt like shouting or doing that night to amuse themselves. Doug thought he was doing a good deed. The neighborhood thought Doug became the focal point of the problem involving underaged “youth” set loose from the Center, who had no business being on the street in Boystown that late at night. Since they weren’t able to go into the bars, and had no money to spend in the 24-hour restaurants, they should have gone home.
Many people think if not for Doug’s misguided kindness, they would have gone home and we never would have had the problems that have developed.
As we tried our hardest to drum up support for a SAVE PIE HOLE campaign, we kept hearing from very angry Boystown residents and business owners that they personally blamed Doug for creating this mess. Once it became known Doug wouldn’t kick them out and was encouraging them to hangout at Pie Hole since they couldn’t get into the bars, word got out that the corner of Roscoe and Halsted was THE place to be for anyone looking to get loud and act up after the Center closed. The ramifications of that are obvious, because absent Doug’s intervention there’s a very real chance these “youth” would have just gotten into the habit of going back home when the Center closed and they had nowhere to use as a late night club house. Now that Pie Hole is closing, that’s going to be the case, and we’re curious to see if, indeed, the problem resolves itself now that there’s no hangout spot for these underaged “youth”.
If there was any justice in the world, or any real desire from the brain trust behind the Center on Halsted, they would hire Doug Brandt TODAY and put him in charge of either the Horizons Youth Program itself or give him funding to open an official Late Night Youth Center somewhere on the Southside in these kids’ own back yard. Doug is a passionate, incredibly bright, caring and loving man who really and truly wants to help these kids (and he’s kind of scruffy-hot too). He has a calling and a drive to do this that took precedence over his own business. He lost everything he worked for because he refused to listen to his friends and neighbors who told him, time and again as we understand it, to pick either staying in business or taking the side of these youth. Doug made his choice, and has lashed out at everyone who tried to tell him the truth, but no matter how much he shouts RAAACIST! at anyone or how much he claims RAAACISM! is the reason his business failed he has only himself to blame for all of this.
Mincing words does not do anyone any good. It does not make Boystown safer. It does not resolve the issue of the Center attracting underaged “kids” with nothing to do when the Center closes but commit crimes. It does not make Doug’s pizza shop/troubled youth center business model viable.
Because the fact of the matter is that as the presence of these loud, obnoxious, in-your-face, pushing and shoving and pickpocketing and mugging “youth” increased in the area surrounding Pie Hole, the desire of going to eat at Pie Hole decreased. Even for us. We’d think about going there to get a slice, but as we’d walk down Halsted and see the latest commotion going on, we’d opt for Ping Pong or Nookie’s instead. Or, if we really wanted pizza, we’d swing down to Panino’s, which is nowhere near as good, and nowhere near as funky and cool, but where we knew the owners would not put gangs of hollering, unpaying teens ahead of customers who wanted to enjoy a nice meal free of harassment.
The marketplace supported a funky, cool, awesome, gay pizza shop that will NEVER be forgotten…until Doug chose to morph that successful business into the pizza shop/troubled youth center it ends its existence as.
Even in Boystown, Liberals need to accept this reality.
Screaming RAAACIST! at anyone who draws your attention to said reality is just tired, cliche, and stale at this point. You can shout this all you want, but after you are done howling we’d love for you to explain how throngs of underage hoodlums carrying on the way they always did on that patio was BENEFICIAL to the business, or served as some sort of attractive selling point for people deciding where to eat dinner that night. Should we go somewhere that we know we will have a good time, enjoy the food, and not be intimidated, threatened, or harassed — or should we go to Pie Hole, take our chances on there MAYBE not being too many Center kids there that night, just because the pizza’s so damn good?
The pizza really WAS that good…unforgettably good…but after dealing with the garbage strewn in our neighborhood by the Center kids for over two years now, even we had to finally admit that Boystown really will — unfortunately — be better as a whole without this business. Since Doug was unwilling to come to reality and stop enabling the “youth” problem, this was really the only outcome that was possible if anyone wants the situation to improve going forward.
We could write another 7,000 words on how much it breaks our hearts to say this, and how hard it is to speak the truth about a business, and a guy, we all really like very much, but this is indeed where things stand.
Liberalism, and its blind tenets and refusal to acknowledge and deal with reality, is what killed this business. Not the recession. Not RAAACISM. Not a shortage of marshmallows on an After School special pizza.
Blind, unyielding, cultish Liberalism.
That’s surely as hard a truth for Doug Brandt to swallow as it is for us to be forced to serve it up.
Someone in the national media is FINALLY interested in Man's Country in Andersonville
How many people working in the White House passed through this door?
This has to be cloak-and-dagger for the time being, because though we’ve not been sworn to secrecy on the project, we’re not at liberty to talk in depth about what we did yesterday, which was in response to one of the occasional requests we get from members of the media for background info on stories they’re doing.
Normally, it’s foreign journalists who get in touch with us when they’re in Chicago and want to go to the Southside to see how terrible it is, and talk about how Obama did absolutely jack squat for it as either a state senator or US Senator, and hasn’t used any of his particular brand of unicorn horn magic to improve it (or the black community residing there) since the illustrious Golden Age of Hope and Change began on January 20th, 2009.
But, this time it was a US reporter who wanted information on Man’s Country in Andersonville, which is a place both Obama and Rahm Emanuel frequented in the past. Obama until 2002 or so, and Emanuel through 2008, according to what we’ve been told. We spent a good amount of time on the ground in Uptown, Boystown, Andersonville, and Hyde Park yesterday with this reporter, also telling him everything we knew about Trinity United Church of Christ and the Down-Low Club it operated under Jeremiah Wright’s supervision/matchmaking.
What prompted this sudden interest in stories we’ve been hearing since 2004, when Obama first came onto the national scene, is the fact that at least one national journalist also thinks it’s odd — as we have been repeatedly saying — that The Enquirer, The Globe, and other papers have been so wildly gung-ho about reporting on old Vera Baker affair rumors pertaining to Obama…and how all of this comes on the heels of Kal Penn’s sudden and abrupt expulsion from the White House.
Something is definitely fishy.
Why the sudden need to portray this current president as an insatiably heterosexual stud who just can’t get enough women?
Baker’s a diversionary tactic…designed to cover SOMETHING up…and we think that something is an affair Obama had with Kal Penn, which seems to have ended badly. We also think Penn was mugged not by a street thug in Dupont Circle, but by someone working for either the DNC or Organizing for America (or any number of its umbrella thugs), because Penn’s phone had something in it that would prove some kind of romantic relationship between the president and a Hollywood actor with zero government experience who was plucked off a TV show unceremoniously and lifted into a high profile made-up position in the White House…so he could be close to Obama in Washington, where Obama wanted him. Wanted in more than one sense.
Until he didn’t want him anymore.
And then someone needed to take his cell phone away, so that any pictures, texts, voicemails, or other interesting itts and bitts could be secured by those wishing to protect the current president.
Some day in the future — and it might very well take 50 years, until all of Obama’s cultists are gone and historians start accurately reporting on this man — we believe Eric Massa, Larry Craig, Trent Lott, Mark Foley, James McGreevey, and their like are going to prove to be boring in comparison when all of Obama’s antics pre, during, and post White House days are exposed. It’s only a matter of time. The story will one day be written. We doubt it will be by the reporter we spent the day with yesterday, but who knows.
It certainly can’t hurt to have someone from the dinosaur media poking around. The more the better, in our opinions.
Help us craft a Mission Statement
For the next two days, we have the VERY generous offer of support from an organizational consultant here in Chicago — one of the very best, actually. The woman’s incredible, someone we’ve heard of before, and, unbeknownst to us, has been a reader since December 2008. She’s giving us tomorrow and Monday to workshop a better path forward for us — one that we hope will get us on track to finish the HillBuzz book, get the new website up and running, begin a regular radio program of our own, and start compiling our archives into future anthologies themselves.
This site just arose organically, with no planning on any of our parts. It just sort of happened. How we got here is a tale for the book, but we find ourselves in a position where we end up guesting on Tammy Bruce, Andrea Shea King, and get mentioned by the likes of Ann Coulter, Rush, and Dennis Miller — which is all still very surreal. So, clearly we’re doing something right…and our readership is actually larger than most of the sites on the Left who attack us every day (thanks to all of them for sending us so many hits, by way of those hate pieces…it all adds into our site count, which looks to hit 10 million sometime the first week of June).
Our primary goal in all of this is to seize the opportunity we wish we had back in 2006, since we believe something like HillBuzz back then could have helped derail Obama before he took the nomination from Hillary Clinton. It would have prevented him from ever becoming president, and for anything in the last two years from happening to this country and our Constitution. We don’t want to squander a single day in the quest to deny Obama a second term…and we do not want to see happen to Sarah Palin in her bid for the White House what the Left, the DNC, and the Lamestream Media did to Hillary in 2007-2008. The Left, the DNC, the RNC, and the LSM are already plotting this — and we want to play a role in stopping them.
We also want to report on the things going on in Chicago the LSM chooses not to report on.
We want to cover Boystown, and tell you the stories you’d never hear otherwise.
We want to teach moderates and conservatives that the gays you read about in The Advocate or Genre and hear about watching LOGO aren’t 100% inclusive of the entire community.
We hope to play a large role in destroying the DNC and salting the earth around it so that the Democrat Party joins the Whigs on history’s scrap heap — since what the DNC did to Hillary Clinton and her supporters has never been forgotten…and what the Democrats have done since taking complete control of Washington in 2009 can, and should, never be forgiven by ANY American.
A Mission Statement sums up all of this stuff, in a very profound and simple way, and encompasses much more than this.
As we work towards crafting this in the next few days, we’d love it if you’d chime in with what you like best about what we do here.
What are the essays and other bits that you’ve enjoyed the most?
What are the things you’ve forwarded to family and friends?
What have we written that you’ve never forgotten?
On an average day, we churn out about 10 posts or so, with about 15,000 words of content (according to our WordPress stats). So, honestly, we don’t even remember all of what we’ve done, or what’s had the best impact, because we’re usually too busy trying to get out the next round of pieces.
So, it would be helpful to hear from you today, so we get an idea of what you think we should include in our Mission going forward…what you think our Vision should be…and where you would like to see us end up in the months and years ahead between now and 2012.
We would sincerely appreciate thoughtful and detailed responses and all of us, including the organizational expert, will read every post in this thread.
Sunday Open Thread: May 23rd, 2010
What’s on your minds this Sunday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Housekeeping Note: Starting tomorrow, Monday, we’re going to automatically delete all comments in moderation that do not have Avatars attached to them. This, we hope, will save us quite a lot of time each day. We’ve been gently nudging all of you to sign up for an Avatar through Gravatar.com, and many of you have, but about 60% of you have not. We’d love for this to be the last time we have this conversation, but here’s the issue in a nutshell:
* We’re bombarded every day with relentless spam from what appears to be a half dozen computers in Asia that send automatic links to Cialis, Viagra, and other scam sites. These IP addresses hit repeatedly, slamming dozens of posts at a time with fake comments that are just collections of random words, or sections of Shakespeare or other classics, cut and pasted into comments to try to trick spam filters into thinking they are legitimate posts. All of these Asian spam attacks end up in comment moderation…none of them are attacked to avatars.
* 95% of the hatemail that comes in is also not attached to avatars. This is because the people submitting these troll droppings don’t want to be easily identified by us. Avatars force them to attach themselves to real emails, and it makes it MUCH easier to track the trolls. Hence, troll comments almost always pop up with gibberish email addresses, avatar-free.
* During the summer, we try to book catering, event planning, project management, and other gigs every single day. In Chicago, May-June-July-August-September are the months when we make 70% of what we need to support ourselves for the year. As much as possible, we double and triple book ourselves every day….meaning we could easily be on the road or on assignment from 6am – 3am, sleeping about 2 hours a day. All of our free time goes into the essays for this site. Most are written on napkins, scraps of paper, or in little Bruce Chatwin moleskin notebooks forever crammed into our back pockets or tucked into our jackets. When we have a spare hour here and there, we hit a computer and type these essays up, as fast as possible, and post them to this site. Nothing can ever be as refined and perfect as we’d like it to be, because we just don’t have the time. So, Spelling Nazis, when you delight in finding some error in text, it’s because there really just isn’t enough time in the day to run spellcheck. Seriously. We wish there was, but there isn’t.
* Something has to give if we want to keep putting out as much content as possible, while also devoting time to finding the few legitimate comments out there in the spam filter moderation purgatory hidden amongst, literally, THOUSANDS of Asian spam and troll messages. This is the only way for comments that end up lost in the moderation queue to find their way onto a post…one of us has to go in there and approve them. And, to be honest, only two of us actually ever do this. Panda promises to, but never does, because he says it’s boring. Joaquin claims he’ll do it, but says he “forgot”. One of us physically can’t do it, because the garbage the trolls fling is just too much for him to ever take full-on like that. That leaves two guys to carry the burden, and if one or the other (or both) gets booked up with work in a week, the first thing that needs to be put on hold is wading through Asian spam and troll messages to find legitimate comments. We’re deeply sorry if that troubles some of you, and we know it must be frustrating that your comment did not make it to the page, but it’s just the nature of what we are dealing with here.
* We’re very grateful for all of the wonderful people who said they would volunteer as moderators for us, in helping to approve messages faster…and we are thinking about ways to make this happen. The way WordPress is set up, though, we’d have to grant full access to the site to do this, and we’re sure you can understand that we’re not comfortable with giving anyone outside Buzzquarters keys to HB. This is our baby, and we’re protective of her. We want to see her grow and develop and kick serious ass in 2012…and we never put her at risk in any way shape or form…so please don’t take any offense to the fact that we are extremely careful in whom we trust. Our deep and sincere hope is to have a new site up soon that would have some way to include moderators out there whom we can empower to take over comment moderation for us, but whom would not have access to our complete site, so that we can compartmentalize this issue. Cross your fingers for this to happen…because it would indeed solve the problem for good. Until then, we just have to find a better way of doing what we are doing now…and we think that solution involves the avatars.
Visually, it’s very easy for us to just scan what’s in moderation and pull out all items we see attached to avatars. Everything else could get deleted unread, since most of it is either spam or troll droppings. At the moment, however, there are still many of you who don’t use avatars…so we are still having to do a second sweep of a page to look for any legitimate comments hidden amongst the junk before we just delete all those non-avatar items.
We’d like to eliminate this second pass, as it’s what takes up so much time.
Starting tomorrow, we’re just going to visually look for avatars in the moderation queue. Those will be approved. The page will reload. If there’s no avatars on that page, we’ll just delete everything on it. A new 20 comments will load on the screen. We’ll look for avatars. Approve those. Delete everything else. Move onto the next 20. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We want comment moderation to take 15 minutes, tops. Because that’s all we can spare.
If you don’t have an avatar yet, please checkout http://en.gravatar.com/
Trust us — they are incredibly cool, and not just a time-saver, troll-buster, spam-defeater for us. If you have trouble setting up an avatar, post a help request in this thread and we’re sure someone can answer the question for you on how to do this. We’re not tech guys. Panda still pounds the tab key expecting gross diet soda to squirt out of the monitor (from what he thinks is a beverage dispenser, but is really the Mac’s built-in web cam). But, even we figured out how to get an avatar loaded.
Please do this so that you will no longer automatically go to Comment Purgatory…unless you are a troll who truly does belong there.
QUESTION: Why is the Center on Halsted such a problem in Boystown?
A reader asked us yesterday why the Center on Halsted is seen as such a problem in Boystown — when ostensibly a community center for the LBGTQ community should be firing on all cylinders as a GOOD THING.
The place is gorgeous — a truly beautiful building, with a Whole Foods attached to it, a marvelous roof top garden, free WiFi, a very nice theater where LGBTQ comedy and musical acts regularly perform, and other amenities like a computer room (where classes are sometimes taught, but also where people without laptops can go and check email or whatever, which is nice).
The Center serves in the feel-good capacity of something gay men, in particular, can give money to without feeling depressed or sad about — unlike AIDS related charities, which are described as “downers” by many we know (especially those who have lost friends and past lovers to AIDS). Attending a benefit or somehow otherwise publicly supporting the Center is, thus, much more desirable to guys who want to appear socially-aware and philanthropical, but who don’t really want to actually help anyone or make a real difference in the community. If they DID want that, they’d be writing their checks to TPAN (the Test Positive Awareness Network, which is bar none the best LGBTQ nonprofit in Chicago, working hard every day to dispel the dangerous myth in the under-30 circuit set that AIDS is no longer something for them to be afraid of).
Here’s the problem with the Center, in a nutshell:
(1) It’s a management train wreck, led by an incompetent buffoon who has absolutely no idea what he is doing. That man’s name is Tico Valle, but everyone calls him “Big Taco”. He’s a diversity hire, picked because he has an interesting name and puts a Hispanic face on the organization. The Liberal-controlled City likes that. The rest of us know just how well picking someone with a unique and diverse name, but lacking any management or executive skills, works out. Barack Obama much?
(2) The Center spends money like it’s grown on trees up on that beautiful rooftop garden. It is a case-study in what happens when Liberals move so far left in their thinking as to believe they have no accountability, no need to make solid financial decisions, and possess unlimited access to a never-depleting reservoir of cash and goodwill. The Center believes gay men will always fund it, because it’s a fun thing to fund. They’ve got that theater, they’ve got the roof top garden, they have the marketing hook of “we’re the COMMUNITY center”, so they think they have no problem securing funds. In reality, they’re so poorly managed financially that they constantly have to lay off staff and routinely run on a skeleton crew, being able to pay so little that the people they do have are not the sort you’d want running anything if you were the hiring director. Most of these people are picked because of their personal narratives and unique names, too, and not the skills they possess.
(3) Pursuant to the above’s funding and spending nightmares, the Center bites off way more than it can chew, promising anything it thinks sounds like a good program to have, in hopes of getting more of those big donations from gay men looking to appear philanthropic. We’ve got Youth Programs! We support Diversity! We provide Hope, and Change, and Unicorns! None of these “programs” are very well thought-out or properly executed. The “Youth Program” amounts to little more than driving around the Southside putting up flyers telling people there that the Center exists, and is a place they can hang out in all day without being chased away. That’s not really a social program, as much an invitation to come north where it’s nicer than where you typically hang out, and just sit around next to the Whole Foods, encounter all sorts of other people just wanting to hang out all day, and ultimately, as a group, start getting ideas for all sorts of trouble you can get into — since you are bored, assembled as a group, and find yourselves amongst the Eloi who have no idea what manner of things you can get up to. The “Youth Program” at the Center used to have a room dedicated to it, where the “Youth” were supposed to go to read, improve themselves, study for GEDs, etc. The “youth” vandalized this room, repeatedly, to the point where the Center locked it off and no longer uses it. It’s unclear if there’s still a “Youth Program” director collecting a salary, since the “Youth Program” largely functions in name only. The Center still promotes this, and still advertises on the Southside for the “youth” to come north to hang out, but once these “youth” are in Boystown, there’s no program to improve their social skills, to educate them, or to rescue them from lives of crime — as the Center promised. Instead, the Center just bangs the equivalent of pots and pans in the woods, calling out whatever predators it can, before setting them loose on the neighborhood.
The reason we just won’t stop talking about this is because we know one of the guys who had his skull smashed in last summer, when he was just walking home late from a bar. The police are very conscious of the City’s desire to avoid ever saying a black person did anything wrong — so great effort is made to avoid ever connecting any of the crimes that are committed in Boystown to the “youth” the Center recruits into the neighborhood from the Southside. The guy we know who was beaten and robbed with a baseball bat was hospitalized in such bad condition that he didn’t even remember being attacked — he thought he just fell. When his friends found him, he was covered in blood. The hospital said he was probably beaten with a bat. Earlier that night, gangs of “Center Youth” were seen with a baseball bat, just loitering on the side streets off Halsted, looking for trouble. The police claim they can’t connect “those kids” to the crime — which is a standard talking point issued by the City on all fronts.
It’s what we call “Sunnydale Syndrome”.
The residents of Sunnydale, California were besieged with vampire attacks on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but they didn’t want to believe vampires were real and were really attacking them. So, the public at large, directed by the Mayor and the city government, went to exhausting lengths to delude themselves that those odd bites on people’s necks were just pinpoint assaults with expensive European scissors. Or, maybe knitting needles. Perhaps the assailant was a wealthy Bavarian senior citizen, a little old lady out for a little homicide before Jeopardy. All that blood loss in the victims was, of course, just anemia. Put more liver on the menu in all the restaurants, eliminate all salt in the kitchens, and we’ll just cater this crime spree away, since the anemia is what made these people so weak they couldn’t get away from those gangs of little old ladies who were most definitely not vampires.
In Boystown, you are socially not allowed to ever say anything bad about a black person — or anything good about a Republican.
Tough luck on that one, because the black people the Center on Halsted actively recruits to come to Boystown from the Southside are the ones who attacked our friend last summer. The black transvestites and transgenders are actually the worst of the lot — they are the shoplifters and pickpockets who have been working Boystown since the Center opened, and since the Center started advertising itself as a place they could use as their club house. The cross-dressing criminals make it harder for the police to catch them, because they can slip in and out of their drag and change their appearances day to day, or even day to evening. It’s also somewhat embarrassing for people to admit they’ve just been mugged by The Supremes, when the 9/11 operator asks for a description of the perpetrators.
That’s when the “liberal” ingrained in so many in Boystown kicks in, because we are all taught never to say a bad word about a black person, no matter what that black person does. If you are critical of anyone black in any way, you are a RAAACIST, and that’s something that absolutely horrifies a gay man. A complicated emotional Rube Goldberg device kicks in that tumbles a gay man through chutes and tubes and ferris wheels since being called a RAAACIST means you are now a pariah, and that means you must be like other pariahs in the the community, like anyone who didn’t vote for Obama, which just CONFIRMS you are a RAAACIST, because anyone who didn’t vote for Obama is a racist, and so then you must be a Republican then, too, because all of them are RAAACISTS as well.
Much better to just pretend you weren’t mugged or beaten with a bat, if pointing your finger to identify the black criminals who assaulted you makes the community victimize you a second time for telling the truth about what happened.
We’ve been to the monthly meetings the Chicago police have on this problem. The Center sends a representative who stands up, like Baghdad Bob during the US invasion of Iraq, and claims there’s no problem and that the “kids” the Center “reaches out to” aren’t causing any problems. Behind him, we imagine tanks rolling through the streets en route to Saddam’s palaces (“What tanks? There are no tanks here? There isn’t a single US soldier in Iraq. Saddam Hussein will rule another 50 years!”). The police then claim all of the shoplifting, break-ins, muggings, pickpocketing, robberies, vandalism, and harassment is “unrelated”, using the most liberal and loose definition of “unrelated” as possible. It’s very much related if you speak the truth and admit all of the above are being committed by Southside blacks who’ve invaded Boystown as their new hunting ground. It’s UNRELATED in the sense that the person who’s pickpocketing might not be the one who tagged that building or who wielded the baseball bat to send someone to the hospital. It’s UNRELATED in the further sense that many of the Center Gang don’t know each other, outside the Center. They’re not coordinating their trips up north to the Center before hand. They are all just individually and uniquely responding to the siren’s call to Boystown, put out there by the Center. Once they get here, they see how easy it is to commit crimes in a neighborhood that willfully and deliberately refuses to admit black people can commit crimes and hurt those who actually live, work, and spend money in Boystown. Whatever elements keep these particular criminals in check in the Southside are absent here.
We hear repeatedly that “these kids” are “misunderstood” and that they come to Boystown because “they need a place where they can be themselves”. It reminds us a lot of what we hear happens at the Shedd Aquarium, in the shark tanks, where bigger, more aggressive sharks bully the smaller ones in one tank…but those smaller sharks become bullies themselves when put into another tank with colorful little fishes unaccustomed to bullying. These “kids” are low men on the food chain on the Southside, and are most likely victimized themselves for not being as tough as the REAL thugs — the tiger shark thugs — that swim the proverbial waters up and down King Drive. But, when they come to Boystown, invited so enthusiastically by the Center, they find themselves surrounded by delicate tangs, angels, and an overabundance of clown fish. Now, they get the chance to be the predators, the big criminal fish in a rainbow pond. And they are thriving.
If these thugs were white, there would not be a problem, because the police would arrest them all and be done with it.
If these “youth” were white, the Center would stop “reaching out” to wherever it was reaching, and would eliminate whatever is attracting these thugs to the Center, and to Boystown at large. If there was some poor white area of the city chock full of muggers, vandals, pickpockets, shoplifters, and assailants, the Center would go out of its way to make sure the residents of that part of town never knew the Center existed. Someone would be the Director of Keeping Us Off Their Radar. Her name would probably be very diverse, like Akosua Korangtangumbarti, hired personally by “Big Taco” himself. She’d have no skills, abilities, or track record of success, but because she’s a black Jewish quadriplegic lesbian, you would be RAAACIST, antisemitic, prejudiced, and homophobic to dare question her performance.
Since the people coming to Boystown to terrorize the neighborhood are black, this problem MUST BE IGNORED. Anyone speaking out against the Center for bringing this criminal element to the neighborhood MUST BE CALLED A RAAACIST. All peacocks must morph into ostriches and pretend the Center has absolutely no connection whatsoever to what is going on, no matter how bad it gets.
And the great fear in the community is that it is going to get really bad this year, if the weather produces a hot and sweaty summer as expected. We’ve had only a few nice days so far, and all of them are memorable for upticks in the presence of the “Center Youth”. Whenever the weather is nice, these thugs come out in force — and the police claim there is nothing they can do about them unless they physically see them committing crimes. They aren’t allowed by the City to prevent or discourage the crimes from being committed, only to stop the crimes in progress and write reports about the crimes after they happen, doing as much as possible to avoid connecting the crimes to the Center on Halsted. Meanwhile, once the Center closes every night, its charges are sent loose onto the street where they yell, scream, hoot, holler, bully, intimidate, harass, and assault those who pass them up and down Halsted, taking position on the various stoops and steps of the buildings on the street, where the police claim they are unable to make them disperse.
But, at the next neighborhood meeting, the Center’s representative will claim there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between what the Center is doing and problems Boystown’s been having since the Center opened.
And anyone saying otherwise is, of course, RAAACIST.
