Another Beachwood Special Report
For at least a year – well, longer, really – a few downstate yahoos have urged whoever would be in charge of such a thing to cut Chicago loose and let it be its own state, the 51st, so as to stop bringing the rest of Illinois down, what with its jobs and tourism and tax dollars and, um, people of color.
Like all right-thinking people, we’re all for it. After all, downstate Illinois should be free to wallow in its own misery, which, if they could bottle it, might save their economy.
And the suburbs? Enough, parasites! Go forth with your country brethren and leave us alone!
But what would the State of Chicago look like? Well, here’s a start – apparently these are the things every state has.
The Chicagoburg Address: “Nine score and two years ago our fathers brought forth on this land by the lake, a new machine, a new cabal, conceived in corruption, dedicated to the proposition that that great men born of vast wealth and the right connections are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great intrastate debate over secession. Testing whether the State or any State, so deceitful and greedy, can long endure. We are met within a great, smoke-filled back room of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that smoke-filled back room, as final resting place for those crumpled and torn brown paper bags that gave their use that that State might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, as long as the Daley family says it is OK to do so.
“But, in a larger sense, we can not defecate – we can not urinate; we can not fornicate – within this smoke-filled back room without the proper permits, user fees, amusement taxes and parking meter credits. The brave Aldermen, stoolies, property tax assessors, building inspectors, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above their power to extract more wealth from the poor and middle class. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget that 99-year parking meter lease that was agreed upon here.
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished grifting which they whom bribed here and thus so nobly were appointed six-figure jobs for being someone’s nephew. It is for us to be dedicated to the great remaining task remaining before us – that we so dishonorably lampoon our detractors downstate; that we dishonor them mercilessly – that we here highly resolve that our corrupted officials failing to have been re-elected not be taken in vain – that this State, under Rahm and any Daley shall have a new birth of inequality and privatized landmarks once public – and that government of the developer, by the developers, for the developers, shall not be ensnared in an FBI sting or wiretapping operation.”
State Beer: Massive Political Corruption.
State Cigarette: The Loose Square.
State Flower: The Blue Dream.
State Motto: “You’ll have to FOIA that.”
State Song: “25 to 6 or 4,” that classic Chicago ode to the reduction of your prison time if you wore a wire.
State College: Oxford U, now with an Englewood campus.
State Animal: The Mole.
State Artifact: The Indictment.
State Amphibian: Ed Burke.
State Capital: The home of whoever the current finance committee chair is.
State Exercise: The Deadlift.
State Fish: The Hammerhead.
State Bait: Property Tax Appeal work.
State Flag: Now with just one star.
State Folk Dance: The Perp Walk.
State Fossil: Ed Burke.
State Fruit: The Banana Peel.
State Insect: The Abated Mosquito.
State Mineral: Lead.
State Language: The Part Of English You Don’t Understand.
State Nickname: Chirock.
State Pet: Sneed.
State Pie: P-Con.
State Prairie Grass: Switchgrass.
State Seal: The Crabeater.
State Reptile: Ed Burke.
State Snack: Tamales But Only From The Good Tamale Guy, Not The Guy Who Comes Before Him.
State Soil: Muddus Operandis, the mud of the political operator.
State Tree: That One Kind Of Apple Tree Whose Apples Don’t Fall Far From It.
State Theater: The chambers of the city council.
State Tartan: The Grid.
State Vegetable: Cabbage (lettuce is also acceptable).
State Grain: Old Style.
State Coffee: O’Hare Starbucks. Leave room for a little skim on the top.
State Handshake: A shot of Malort, a PBR and a fitty wrapped around your driver’s license.
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Contributing: Nick Shreders, Tom Chambers, Scott Gordon, Kiljoong Kim, Mike Luce, J.J. Tindall, Steve Rhodes
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Comments welcome.
Posted on April 23, 2019