Around four o’clock yesterday afternoon, Gretchen told me she had a totally distraught, sobbing man on Line Two. When I answered, it turned out to be Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Daley: Hello, is this Tom Collins?
Tom: Yes, Your Honor, it is I.
Daley: Have you… heard what’s just happened?
Tom: To tell the truth, sir, if it has happened in the last four hours, I probably haven’t. I’ve been working on an analysis of whether or not, given the current global economic situation, Ireland should stay in the European Union or have a Grand Going Out of Business Sale.
Daley: Really? What did you find out?
Tom: I’m not at liberty to say, Your Honor, but I would advise you to prepare for a new and very large influx of Irish into Chicago.
Daley: Oh, great, that’s just what we need!
Tom: You, yourself, are of Irish ancestry, are you not?
Daley: Right – exactly what I said – that’s just what we need!
Tom: But of course. How can I help you this afternoon?
Daley: You have been following 2016 Olympic venue selection race, haven’t you?
Tom: I have – as I recall, Chicago was one of the contenders in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the International Olympic Committee is…
Daley: Was!
Tom: Was?
Daley: Yes, was preparing to announce their choice.
Tom: Oh. And, I take it from your verbal demeanor, which is to say, the trembling anxiety and disappointment evident in your every word, that some city other than Chicago won?
Daley: Yeah, but it’s even worse than that!
Tom: Really? You mean, you find the IOC’s choice to be particularly galling for some reason?
Daley: Damn it all, they selected Rio de Janeiro! In Brazil!
Tom: I know where Rio de Janeiro is, sir.
Daley: Well, who the hell do they think they are, anyway?
Tom: I image they think they are the International Olympic Committee.
Daley: Well, maybe so, but does that give them the right to totally disrespect Chicago? People are out in the streets here, ready to riot!
Tom: I’m sure they’ll get over it, Your Honor.
Daley: But we Chicagoans just don’t understand! How could a city with ubiquitous, entrenched and obscene poverty, plagued by crumbling, barely maintainable infrastructure, constantly reeling from ongoing municipal failures of every imaginable stripe, blighted by huge, revolting slums, rotten to the core with corruption, poisoned by seamy vice at every turn and overrun with rampant disregard for the law and pernicious drug abuse of every variety, beset by a shocking lack of morality, civilized values and common decency; a city where the very streets themselves are controlled by vicious, merciless organized crime gangs – a city that lives hand-to-mouth, and day-to-day, on the verge of financial, organizational and, I dare say, societal collapse – a city that serves as a nauseating and shameful example of the worst urban shortcomings that anyone can possibly conceive of – how could a city like that beat out Chicago as an Olympic venue?
Tom: Your Honor, I have absolutely no idea.
Daley: Me, neither!
Tom: You know, maybe Chicagoans shouldn’t blame themselves for this.
Daley: What do you mean?
Tom: I mean, maybe they can blame the federal government instead.
Daley: What?
Tom: Well, why not? Everybody else does. Look at it this way – say Chicago did win the 2016 Olympics. Now, suppose you’re a foreigner, a genuine Olympic sports fan, who wants visit Chicago to attend the 2016 Olympic Games. You spend a huge amount of money for airline tickets, you max out your credit cards booking a room in a decent Chicago hotel, then you clean out the rest of your bank account so you’ll have enough money for dining, buying Olympic souvenirs and properly celebrating when your favorite teams or fervently worshiped national athletes win something. But you don’t care – you’re going to the 2016 Olympics in Chicago!
Daley: Yeah, right! The 2016 Olympics in Chicago!
Tom: But then, after you land at the airport…
Daley: Oh, my God, Jesus Christ Almighty!
Tom: So, you see…
Daley: Yeah! I see exactly what you’re getting at…
Tom: The fine ladies and gentlemen of the United States Department of Homeland Security take one look at you…
Daley: And before you know it, you’re standing in a gray cinder block room at the back of the airport in your birthday suit, and one of them has their latex-covered fist halfway up…
Tom: Say no more, Your Honor, I’m sure we both get the picture. Now, say what you want about Brazil, nobody who’s busted their piggy bank to travel halfway around the world in order to be there in person to witness the Olympic gymnastics, table tennis, wrestling, water polo, volleyball, fencing, archery, cycling and badminton competitions…
Daley: Hey, wait a minute! If somebody went to the Summer Olympics to see that stuff, they’d probably enjoy a latex-covered fist up their…
Tom: Okay, point taken. To see the field and track, rowing, basketball, pentathlon, diving, weight lifting, shooting, handball, boxing and taekwondo events, then.
Daley: Right. Those people would be completely outraged!
Tom: Hopping mad.
Daley: Totally ape!
Tom: With all due respect to apes, undoubtedly they would, Your Honor. And, of course, it goes without saying that, well, you know what kind of people DHS hires…
Daley: Tell me about it! I wish I had a nickel for every drooling, chowder-headed, otherwise unemployable loser that I’ve had to, you know, pull a few strings for to get them a local homeland security job, just because one of their relatives delivered a few votes in some half-forgotten, crappy little ward somewhere in the city.
Tom: Sure, and you know, it would be dollars to doughnuts that they’d snag some internationally famous Olympic athlete they’ve never even heard of at the airport and do unspeakable things to them, all in the name of United States national security…
Daley: And when they did, it would be all over the media…
Tom: You bet, Your Honor, all over the media everywhere in the world. And people in places the average Chicagoan can’t even pronounce would be arriving at very negative, highly undesirable and perpetually indelible conclusions about your fair city, all of which would, of course, be utterly wrong and misinformed, but nevertheless…
Daley: Okay, sure, I get it – Chicago didn’t get the Olympics because of 9/11. Israel dragged America around by the ear for decades, got us to do their dirty work for them, got us to sell them all the best weapons, then thumbed their nose at all their neighbors, and that stirred up those clueless, backward towel heads over there in Arabia and stuff, which made them sneak over here, hijack some airplanes and kill a whole bunch of people when we weren’t looking. Now the entire damn country’s gone bat-spit paranoid loony about terrorism, and foreigners are afraid to come to the United States – anywhere in the United States, including Chicago – to attend the Olympics! This whole thing is Israel’s fault!
Tom: Uh, well, frankly, I’d recommend you blame it all on Al Qaeda instead. That sells better.
Daley: Oh, yeah, right – Al Qaeda. They’re to blame for everything.
Tom: Well, anything you can’t blame on the US government, anyway.
Daley: But not Chicago.
Tom: No way, Your Honor. Everybody knows that the city of Chicago is a veritable paradise on earth, a legendary nexus of culture, refinement and erudition. Chicago has never been to blame for anything, unless you count excessive love of virtue, overly exuberant philanthropy, and enthusiastically charitable senses of comity and tolerance.
Daley: You know, Collins, I like you.
Tom: I’m sincerely flattered, Your Honor.
Daley: So, ah, what do I…
Tom: I consider this conversation to be what marketing consultants would call a “loss leader,” Your Honor. If Chicago ever has any further problems with which you believe I can render assistance, then, at that time, we can discuss fees and such.
Daley: Why, that’s extremely generous of you, Mr. Collins.
Tom: Think nothing of it, Your Honor.
Daley: Well, then, thanks for your insights on the situation.
Tom: You’re very welcome, Your Honor. And remember, there are much more important things for Chicagoans to worry about than the Olympics. Think of all the money Chicago will save, not having to build all those huge, essentially useless Olympic stadiums and so forth. Why, those things are nothing but big pork barrel projects for local wheeler-dealers anyway, aren’t they? Enormous, useless white-elephant projects that unscrupulous miscreants use to siphon off wheelbarrows of illicit cash for graft, kickbacks and back-room sweetheart deals for undeserving, evil…
Daley: Um, yeah, right, I couldn’t agree more…
Tom: I’m certain you couldn’t, Your Honor. Without the 2016 Olympics, Chicago will now be able to spend all that money on schools, bridges, highways, water and sewer systems, public health, tax incentives for your business community…
Daley: Ah, sure… absolutely… uh, I gotta go. I have a meeting or something, I think…
Tom: Then I won’t detain you further. Good day, Your Honor.
Daley: Uh-huh. Goodbye.
I must say, it is a bit of a shame, though. After all, what foreign visitor to the US would hold a few intimate moments with our valiant guardians of democracy against us, when, in return, they could take an elevator up to the top of the Sears Tower (yes, I know Sears doesn’t own it anymore, but they still call it that in Chicago), stroll along the waterfront to gaze out on the murky depths of Lake Michigan, experience the unbridled animal spirits of the Mercantile Exchange, or ride the El down to the South Side for some truly heart-stopping pork ribs? Oh, well, yeah, I guess certain foreign visitors wouldn’t want to eat those ribs, but there’s always the guided tours of the stockyards or a leisurely hour or two taking in Chicago’s world-renowned tourist attractions, including the city’s famous art museum, or that notorious Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, which, the inside word has it, depicts a woman having an orgasm right there in front of God and everybody – in Chicago, no less. Now, let’s see what’s in the old Quarterly Mailbag.
My post on July 3 (which was the one with the previous QM, BTW), drew a lot of comments on the Romani people, including five from other people who said they have been kidnapped by Gypsies, too. The story was apparently so nice, all I got was positive mail about it. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. And, as usual, there were a few dolts who wrote in to comment on the responses to e-mails I posted in the July QM. So now, I suppose, they expect me to reply to their comments on my responses to their original e-mails, thus creating some weird kind of private discussion thread with the potential to go on and on, indefinitely, until they finally terminate it in accordance with Godwin’s Law by calling me a Nazi or comparing one of my statements to something uttered by Hitler – or maybe end the exchange by seeking to validate their pathetic little life, writing “YHBT” all very snarky and such. Sorry kids, but Homey don’t play that game. You read my Web log, you write me an e-mail, and every ninety days, I respond to my e-mails in my Quarterly Mailbag feature. And that’s were it ends. Doesn’t anybody read the About page?
My piece about Minot, the Washington Post reporter, and the attempts that newspaper’s publisher made to increase revenues resulted in almost universal condemnation of Katharine Weymouth, as might be expected. But what surprised me was that nearly seventy percent of the e-mails I received basically said “goodbye and good riddance to newspapers!” I guess the clear majority in favor of substituting paper towels for newspapers in all those other deployments which don’t involve reading them might stem from Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log being, ahem, a new media entity hosted on the Internet, where, presumably, people who favor reading without killing trees would naturally congregate. Some correspondents did write in to agree with Minot that he has a journalism degree and I don’t, and therefore, I should get the hell out of Minot’s sandbox. Yeah – me and about a hundred million other people. I’ll wait until at least half of them stop. I’m sure I’d know if and when that happens, too, because it’s a dead cinch every newspaper in the world will run a front-page story about it, and, after all, I do subscribe to the Washington Post.
The article which split its subject matter between President Obama’s visit to Ghana and the rising clamor for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to resign brought in about ten e-mails each in favor of Schwarzenegger or Obama, most of which scolded vociferously for either for all those jokes about how broke Californians are these days or the anecdote about gazunga, respectively. Everybody else who wrote in about it found the post most entertaining, thank you.
I don’t know why, but every time I write about him, I forget that Dick Cheney actually has supporters, some of whom, incredibly, read this blog. So it was that I got plenty of stuff from them about how Dick’s a true American hero and I’m a dirty fink. My tale of our encounter in a downtown Washington DC parking garage sparked a large number of admonitions to show more respect for Dick when I write about him. But I’d say that I already do – can I help it if he’s an aerospace cowboy from Wyoming?
Warning – giving advice to foreign diplomats about how to insult tin-pot dictators and/or incompetent secretaries of state will not make you popular with either of their fan bases. In response to my July 23 post, Hillary Clinton’s organization flooded my Inbox with e-mails, all vigorously protesting that Hillary Clinton’s face does not, in fact, look like some kind of huge rodent, that her thighs are no thicker than most women’s, that the sound of her voice does not, in fact, cause screech owls and hyenas to retreat in fright, that she most assuredly is not some kind of feminist crypto-fascist, man-hating closet lesbian who only got married to a corrupt, philandering sociopathic politician in order to further her own twisted career goals and pursue her own perverted ambitions; or a woman who despises sex with men so much, her daughter Chelsea had to be conceived with a hooker, a Dixie cup and a turkey baster. Nor, they assured me, is she so wrinkly she has to screw her hat on. The North Koreans took a different approach – they had somebody from the Burmese Embassy throw a brick through my bedroom window.
But it was the post about my talk with James River Rice about that audio tape containing the alleged exchange between Harvard’s Professor Henry Gates, Jr. and Cambridge Massachusetts Police Sergeant James Crowley that got the prize for most e-mails this quarter. They said the sort of thing one might expect, to be sure, and it was very easy to tell whether the person who wrote a particular e-mail was white or black, too. There was simply no middle ground, which, I believe, is perfectly congruent with the contemporary American scene. In addition, three people wrote in to say that they, too, attended the dinner where Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and House Minority Leader John Boehner put on the performance recorded in that audio file. They noted that the reason the recording was so convincing is nobody laughed when Steele imitated Gates and Boehner did Crowley. I was there, and besides the two of them prattling, you could hear a pin drop. The people at that dinner had absolutely no idea what to make of what was going on. It’s hard to say, but maybe if Boehner had done Gates and Steele had done Crowley, it might have been funny.
Apparently a lot of folks were genuinely sorry to learn that my dear brother-in-law Hank lost his job. Thanks – there’s way too much of that going around these days, and Hank didn’t deserve to get laid off any more than anybody else does. A few people wrote in with distinctly differing sentiments, however, roundly criticizing the products Hank sold as decadent, overpriced harbingers of the decline of civilization as we know it, and decrying Hank’s customers as rich, spoiled, status-obsessed women who were, in those correspondents’ estimation, probably not very good mothers, either. I really had no idea that fashionable, upscale baby and infant care products could rouse such implacable ire. Now I know. There were also about a score of angry epistles from various Virginians, who claim that my description of their state was unfair, that Chincoteague is not, in fact, populated primarily by poor white redneck trash who don’t know any better and also, that all those stunted, tiny versions of Eastern Seaboard life forms which inhabit those Atlantic barrier islands are charming and cute, not pathetically deformed from generation upon generation of malnutrition. Cuteness, of course, I will admit, is in the eye of the beholder, but I would advise that anyone who thinks those people are right about Virginia visit it to see for themselves if Cerise was making stuff up – and I’m not talking about staying overnight in the Reston Marriott, either. Go check out Danville, down by the North Carolina border, or Grundy, over by east Tennessee. Hell, just take a good look at Richmond, for Christ’s sake. Sheesh!
The post about the August 7 DDOS attack on Twitter and Facebook got a lot of mail berating me for, well, not respecting Twitter and Facebook, actually. They, the loyal users and fans of these sites, I was acidly informed, most certainly do not spend all their time tweeting and then posting to Facebook about it. They do plenty of other things, like surf Web sites and read stuff, and when somebody tweets them the URL for Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log, or posts the link on their Facebook page with the caption “U wnt blv wat a a**hole ths gy IS!!” by golly, they click on that link, spend at least thirty seconds checking me out and then send me an e-mail tellng me wat a a**hole I am. Also, it seems that Cyxymu has a fan base of his own, and I got plenty of grief from them. Of course, since almost all of them are from Eastern Europe and tried to tell me off in English, I have to thank them for writing – I haven’t laughed so hard in months.
Feminists of every stripe read me the Riot Act in their e-mails about Dr. Amatullah Lumumba Venceremos Mariátegui’s visit concerning Hillary Clinton. How dare I belabor the fact, they demanded, that a young male Congolese college student asked a question that caused Secretary Clinton to make a complete fool of herself? What’s more, most (but certainly not all) pointed out tartly, the vast majority of Hillary’s supporters are not the raving, castrating man-haters that Dr. Mariátegui appears to be. Okay, ladies, if you say so. Plus, there were quite a few messages excoriating me for dragging poor Chelsea into the post with that business about Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor, the Kenyan who offered Hillary forty goats and twenty cows for Chelsea in 2000, and recently made the offer again for the somewhat reduced terms of twenty five goats and nine cows. To that I can only reply – hey, it’s not like I made that up, now is it?
The story of how my dear brother Rob Roy got arrested for decking a bunch of morons in an Atlanta bar drew quite a bit of commentary, most of it favorable. From what I read in those e-mails, it looks like a lot of folks are getting really fed up with the tea-baggers (no, not that kind – the conservative wing-nut kind) and their absurd claims that the Obama Administration is out to turn America into some kind of Socialist dictatorship by forcing everybody to buy health insurance. Quite a few also concurred with my advice to Rob that, just because you have the right to do something, that doesn’t automatically make doing it a good idea. About a hundred of them mentioned that they have children, and, after reading that remark, tried it out on them. Nine reported that it worked.
About forty percent of the readers who wrote me about my post concerning Governor Mark Sanford said he’s an unprincipled, philandering sex maniac who doesn’t deserve to be the governor of a steam engine, much less South Carolina. Another twenty percent said, sure, he’s an unprincipled, philandering sex maniac, but if that were grounds for removing politicians from office, our state Capitols would be vacant but for the security and janitorial staff plus a couple of doddering politicians too old to mess around anymore and too weak to withstand a dose of Viagra. Another fifteen percent said he’s done nothing legally wrong by cheating on his wife with an Argentine firecracker, while ten percent said he’s done nothing wrong, period. Of those remaining, seven percent want him to run for governor again, five percent want him to run for President and three percent thought the post was about Fred Sanford.
My political correctness was widely questioned in the flurry of e-mails that followed my post on August 31. Apparently, what was an amusing lyric in 1947, and obviously considered respectable and suitable for appreciation in polite company, given that the song was performed by the squeaky clean Danny Kaye and the even squeakier and cleaner Andrews Sisters, is not at all acceptable today. Oddly enough, though, a number of readers informed me that “Civilization” is used as the theme music for the video game Fallout 3. The premise of that game, I was told, is that it is the year 2277, two centuries after a nuclear war between the United States and China, and the players roam the ruins of Washington, DC, fighting giant mutant insects, carnivorous radioactive slime worms, and so forth, as well as each other. A couple of these avid gamers informed that in Fallout 3, the town of Great Falls, Virginia, where I live, is populated by rapacious, greedy monsters who prey on the weak and unwary, stealing from the unfortunate whatever they can. I’m pleased to hear Great Falls, Virginia won’t change all that much in two hundred and sixty-eight years. But it seems to me that anyone who is worried about what effect the theme song for this video game will have on young, impressionable minds is missing the point. For all you technologically bewildered aunts and uncles out there, BTW, Fallout 3 is available for the Xbox. So, come the holidays, if you’re seeking a Christmas stocking-stuffer or Hanukkah gift for some innocent tyke on your gift list, well, check to see if they have a Microsoft Xbox gaming system first, of course, and that they aren’t already playing Fallout 3 – and if so and if not, respectively, they’re bound to appreciate a copy of it more than the latest Harry Potter tome, which they will probably have read by the time you give it to them anyway. And oh yeah – absolutely nobody sent me an e-mail concerning the elections in Gabon, which is what that post was actually about.
And speaking of juvenile pursuits like video games, Marvel comic fans far and wide excoriated me for what they considered unfair treatment of their beloved super heroes. I was angrily informed, on numerous occasions, that people who read action comics most emphatically do not fantasize that they are super heroes themselves. Super hero comics, they proclaimed, are a legitimate art form which harkens back to the venerable and ancient traditions of oral legends and sagas, such as Beowulf and the various poems of Homer. I should therefore show due respect for these works, which, I was also informed, should be properly referred to as “graphic novellas.” Anime, they also warned, is not to be trifled with by the likes of me, either. The post was about the Disney takeover of the Marvel Group, and a grand total of five people wrote to weigh in on that issue. Four of them think it will totally ruin all the great Marvel characters. One person said they think it’s a good idea. I checked out the sender’s e-mail address – they work for Disney.
Congressman Joe Wilson will be pleased to know, I presume, that the post about him drew ten more responses than the one about comic books, ah, graphic novellas, whatever. More than half of them insisted that the Republicans are not lying about how much money loyal American conservatives are sending in to fill Mr. Wilson’s campaign coffers and almost all of them also told me that they think Mr. Wilson would be a much better President than that so-and-so Barack Hussein Obama, who, after all, they pointed out, wasn’t even born in the United States and shouldn’t have been allowed to run for President in the first place. Replying to the second part of their remarks first, I would observe that they can rant and rave all they want about where Mr. Obama was born, but they will never get him out of the White House with that song and dance. Not that I expect them to stop doing it, of course. On the first part, I’m sure they’re correct. Mr. Wilson was obviously lying to me about how little money he was receiving so he would have an excuse not to pay my consulting fee.
The mysterious epidemic of foot-in-mouth disease that swept America in mid-September appears to have subsided – for the moment, at least. The post about my consultation with Kanye West concerning his fulminating case of that condition, which manifested itself at the MTV Video Music Awards, drew a large number of e-mails from his fans, the majority of whom praised me for agreeing with Kanye concerning most of the things he said about Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Many of them took me to task, however, for making the point that I did, that rap, Kanye’s musical genre, is as far removed from today as big band swing music was from the Beatles when they were playing Shea Stadium. One correspondent’s comment that “Kanye’s got his [expletive] together! You be the [expletive] dinosaur, [expletive]!” conveys the general gist nicely, I think. To which I say, a dinosaur be as a dinosaur do. Care for some more pterodactyl, Kanye? I hear you prefer it to eating crow. As for Taylor Swift’s fans – well, I sure hope I don’t run into any of them on a dark street. The girls will beat me up and the boys will scratch my eyes out.
There seemed to be a great deal of confusion as to exactly who my visitors on September 22 actually were. I received a torrent of nasty e-mails from people who thought I had mistreated covert ACORN operatives and another, slightly larger one from people who were sure I had abused conservative undercover activists. Needless to say, what I was called and the spurious motives speculatively attributed to me varied accordingly. To all of those people, I say this – it doesn’t matter who they were or why they tried to record a secret video of me in my office, what matters is they tried to record a secret video of me in my office! I reserve the right to give anybody I catch doing that exactly what they deserve. Any of you who wrote in complaining about what happened to those punks should post a sign outside your work place that says, “Permission for anybody to secretly make sound and/or video recordings on these premises is hereby legally granted.” Now, let’s see how many of you do that.
Reactions to the Meg Whitman post on September 28 are still pouring in. As I expected, many people in California are in a terrible snit, DECLARING TO ME IN CAPITAL LETTERS that Californians are NOT all a bunch of avocado-brained simpletons who spend every available minute of their free time shopping for useless junk on eBay. Others are staunchly supporting Ms. Whitman with statements like “If she’s smart enough to make a billion dollars, she’s smart enough to be governor of California!” Which, I believe, is her primary argument, actually.