Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
One
The future belongs to the young and by now my view of college football is as antiquated as those sports fans who wistfully remember the Brooklyn Dodgers.
So the College Football Playoff National Championship was played this Monday, did you catch it? An average of 22.1 million viewers did. That sounds like a lot, but it represented a 12% decline from a year ago, and when compared to the top shows for 2024 would rank 54th, just behind Week 17 Sunday Night Football.
The ridiculousness about Elon Musk’s hand gesture reminded me of something: In his memoir of Spain before and during their civil war, Arturo Barea said that on one occasion, he was showing a friend how tall a child was–“like this,” he said, holding up his hand to indicate the height. He was accused of giving the Fascist salute, and was saved from the firing squad only by the intervention of credible friends.
(A break today from matters political.)
Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.
A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.
Today is the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children and I found my mind drawn to Christopher Hitchens. In 1988 Hitchens said, regarding abortion:
“Look, once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of “the woman’s right to choose.” If the unborn is a candidate member of the next generation, it means that it is society’s responsibility. I used to argue that if this is denied, you might as well permit abortion in the third trimester. I wasn’t as surprised as perhaps I ought to have been when some feminists—only some, and partly to annoy—said yes to that. They at least were prepared to accept their own logic, and say that the unborn is nobody’s business but theirs.”
Of course now for nearly all feminists, 37 years later, the right to unlimited abortion is enshrined in holy script.
The ironic things about Hitchens’s views was that he was an atheist; however, he was honest and a contrarian as opposed to an ideologue. He started as a Trotskyist, for many years considered himself a democratic socialist, and changed his views again after 9/11, notably breaking with The Nation over its opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
My first taste of Hitchens came when I was a wee lad listening to him on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Like him, hate him, I don’t think he cared; he was fearless and went where he thought his values and intellect showed the way. He was always worth the time, whether you agreed with him or not.
Hitchens was an immigrant to the US and died in 2011. I would dearly have loved to hear his views of the past 10 years.
One
It’s been a long time since I had as much fun as I did yesterday. From about 11:58 AM, when J.D. Vance took the oath of office, to 9:00 PM or so when I called it a night to the sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth on CNN, it was just awesome.
I have had a gut feeling that started with Butler last summer. That feeling grew in August with Kamala’s attempt at “Joy” and “Brat Summer.” It grew even stronger during Jimmy “Malaise Forever” Carter’s funeral.
It was stronger still during Trump’s inaugural address, when he said, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation. One that increases its wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons… launching astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on planet Mars.”
Then
when Trump pardoned the J6 protesters, with pictures of them being released from jail, it hit me.
We’re in a color revolution. No more apologies for being American. In a world of growing darkness, we will be the shining light of the West. To paraphrase that great philosopher Reginald Martinez Jackson, we will once again be the straw that stirs the global drink.
I hereby call it the Orange Man Revolution.