The readers of Inside Pulse deserve a nice Christmas gift from the site. What better gift to give them than me? You know you come here in case I write something new (and those of you who haunt the Wrestling section, yes, I should be back for RumbleMania Season). So, Happy Freakin’ Holidays, everyone. And someone had better, I mean better, edit the Inside Pulse entry at TVTropes to include me. No one comes here for Keith and Lucard and you damn well know it.

Before we begin, I think I will give a You’re A Moron to Yukon Cornelius as Scotty G suggested due to his response to my last post in Moodspins. Yeah, it’s been a month and a half, but morons have a longer shelf life than Rice-a-Roni. Just to refresh your memories, here was Yukon’s response:

Holy crap! I don’t know what drugs this blogging tool is taking, but cut your dosage in half. Nice shtick, poseur, but you would already be dead if you said any of this stuff out loud to actual people.

1) If you were a regular reader of my work, and the fact that you’re not indicts you in so many ways, you would know exactly what I’m on. To refresh memories, that would be Cymbalta, Seroquel, Xanax, and K-Dawgs. I not only have admitted it, I’ve done extended columns on it. Readers in Wrestling still remember the column I did when Regal came out with his autobiography and admitted what drugs he used, and I compared my experiences on the same drugs. So now you know.

2) Poseur? Moi? Oh, you aren’t a regular reader of me, are you?

3) I’ve said the same thing to people in public, and worse. Guess what? I’m still here. You, however, are now a target of my rabid fanboys. The moment I declare YAM on someone, it’s Pavlov Ding-Dong Time.

Don’t bother responding to this. And change your handle and stop insulting the good name of Yukon Cornelius.

Now, to business…

I’ve had a number of people write me asking me my opinion on the situation surrounding a certain Governor of Illinois and certain alleged acts of malfeasance he may or may not have committed. As a Chicago Democrat, obviously I’d be knowledgeable on the subject and have a certain inside perspective, being of a certain age (44, in case you lost count) and having been through many of these scandals during my lifetime. Well, goody for you, because I’ve reached the end of my particular rope in re the editorial cartoons and commentary in various publications, electronic and dead-tree, from people who don’t have that perspective.

Let’s deal with the two separate issues that are in play here. The first one is the alleged obscene language that Rod the Mod used. I have to admit that I’m at a handicap here. Widro, in his futile attempt to make this site seem more professional in order to get us a Wikipedo entry and a feed on Google News (just like 411!), essentially banned the use of the more blatant obscenities here a while back. As anyone who’s ever read me knows, this places me at a disadvantage. I’m no longer allowed to pull a Spider Jerusalem and submit a five-thousand word column consisting of five thousand uses of a certain word beginning with F. And this points out something about Chicagoans. We know how to use uncouth language, and we learn it early. By the time we hit second grade, we know how to use the F Word as verb, noun, adjective, adverb, participle, gerund, conjunction, and parts of speech not yet discovered by linguistics experts. It’s Schoolhouse Rock as an HBO Original Series. And, nowadays, the kids are learning how to do it in English and Spanish. The only Americans who have greater facility with the F Word are Philadelphians, and even they’re getting more practice at using it these days thanks to a Chicagoan named Donovan McNabb.

So what does this mean? It means that Blago was speaking in a normal Chicago vocabulary. This is something not understood by people who reside in what The Demon Hosebeast Sarah Palin claimed was the Real America, the rural hinterlands where bitter people who cling to religion and guns believe that “Goddamn” will cause God to Damn you. We talk like this all the time. We talk like this to our friends and family. We talk like this at moments that some people might consider inopportune. For instance, my using the F Word to my father on his deathbed, preceded by the word “go” and post-scripted by “yourself”, when he asked me to forgive him for making my life a psychological toxic waste dump. A Chicagoan has to edit himself (or herself) when talking to people who are not Chicagoans in order to pander to their particular perception of obscenity. But if it’s Chicagoan to Chicagoan, anything goes.

And this lax attitude extends to Chicago politicians. Let me tell you a little historical secret. It involves the gentleman who has been serving as mayor of our fine city for the last two decades. He, of course, learned politics at the feet of his father, The Greatest Mayor In The History Of The Known Universe. Part of his education took place at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The fact that police and protesters were bashing the living crap out of each other while their home neighborhood was hosting the convention took a slight toll on Daleys pere and fils. During the rioting, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Triple H’s Home State got up to speak, and started condemning the actions of the police, who were there, of course, to preserve disorder (Mayor Daley’s words, not mine). During the speech, the live television cameras panned over to the Daley family, who were screaming at Ribicoff. Of course, due to the noise, you couldn’t hear what either of them were saying. However, they were on camera long enough for experienced lip-readers to catch what Mayor Present and Mayor Future were yelling. And you can probably figure out what one of the more frequent words used was. Please note the situation: the mayor of Chicago and his son were screaming the F Word at a US Senator on live national television. A denial was quickly put out by the mayor’s then-press secretary, Earl Bush, thus proving that liars named Bush are present in both political parties. To this day, Richie denies he ever said that to Ribicoff. Of course, he has to deny it due to social mores. But he certainly sees nothing wrong with it. Nor does any other Chicagoan.

To Chicagoans, our use of the F Word has proven something that Lenny Bruce posited in his routines in the early Sixties: the more frequent the use of an offensive word, the less power it possesses to offend. Unfortunately, Bruce was never able to prove this using his specific example, and that’s clear on this site, where use of his example word is inevitably censored into “n*gger”, even in my Goes As Is columns. Another bit of irony is that, during Mayor Daley’s tenure, Bruce was arrested in Chicago for obscenity (ditto the much-missed George Carlin when Carlin was a young Bruce acolyte). Of course, Bruce wasn’t arrested for use of the F Word; Chicagoans didn’t even blink at that. He was arrested for what one might call blasphemy, by an Irish police captain who was offended by what Bruce said about the Pope. You don’t F with the Church in this town.

To summarize: if you’re offended by the Expletive Deleteds on Blago’s taped conversations, you’re not a Chicagoan and you don’t understand. So F off.

Now let’s get to the meat of things. We can all agree on one thing: Rod the Mod is Guilty Guilty Guilty. But here’s a point that most of you probably don’t understand: what he’s guilty of in your minds is vastly different than what he’s guilty of in ours. Let me explain.

You believe that he committed a crime by attempting to sell President Obama’s Senate seat. Technically, that is against the law, which makes it illegal. There’s also the feeling among you that his act was fundamentally immoral, a breach of the trust between the elected and those who elected him. That might be true in your minds. It’s not in ours.

What you call Illegal and Immoral, we call Business As Usual.

There is a axiom that Chicagoans learn from the cradle: Nothing Is Free. This is especially true in politics. The late Mike Royko summed up things quite well in regard to Chicagoans’ attitude toward what others see as corruption, and I’ll paraphrase here: the Cubs are on the North Side, the Sox are on the South Side, the sun rises in the morning and sets at night, and the politicians are corrupt. They always have been. They always will be. And it doesn’t matter what party they’re from. Remember that the high water mark of gangster activity in Chicago took place under a Republican mayor (the last one, ever). Chicagoans know this, and compensate for this, like the Internet compensates for damage. Except that this isn’t damage to the system, it’s a fundamental part of it. We work with corruption and incorporate it into the running of the system and the expectations of the results of that system.

We also find it to be efficient. Put Money A Into Pocket B makes it much easier to get things done. We go into this knowing exactly what we’ll have to pay to get results. It’s still going on today. No, it isn’t as blatant as it was when I was growing up and the Machine was still strong and vibrant, but it’s still there. Who You Know and How Much You Got? is still more important than What You Know. So the fact that Blago put up a US Senate seat for auction…well, it’s a combination of Business As Usual and a nice, refreshing flashback to the pre-1913 days when state legislators appointed US Senators. Every Senate seat could be bought back then. It was the nature of the game. And it’s still the nature of the game to us. If you want something, you are expected to pay for it. Gas, grass, or ass; nobody rides for free.

Now, I stated earlier that we think Rod was guilty too, but the reason why is different than yours. Here’s that difference: you think he’s guilty of corruption by attempting to sell a Senate seat. We think he’s guilty of violating a fundamental law of Chicago politics: Only Take The Small Stuff. In the 1890s, a very intelligent alderman named Michael Kenna, nicknamed “Hinky Dink” due to his lack of height, established a formula which has served us well ever since: if you’re going to be corrupt, don’t go for the Big Score, no matter how tempting it may be. Stick to small bits of graft, on the logical, intelligent principle that if you do it enough, you’ll make the same as you would from the Big Score and not expose yourself to any risks. Don’t shake down anyone for more than they’re willing to pay, because you’ll risk not getting anything. Set the price appropriately, take their money, and then deliver, because you don’t want to alienate someone who might be a future customer for your services.

Kenna knew what he was doing. He and his extrovertive partner in aldermanic follies, Bathhouse John Coughlin (his nickname originated due to his early employment as a rubber in a Turkish bath, not from any particular sexual predilictions…although from the way he dressed, you might have some suspicions in this regard), controlled the Levee, Chicago’s consolidated red-light district from the late 1880s to 1915. They established principles of graft that made everyone rich, from themselves to the police chain of command that took the payouts to the operators of the booze joints and brothels. Even the white slavers got rich; they knew that their particular crime required more in the nature of payment to protect, and they paid it. Nobody got greedy, nobody paid out more than they could afford or were willing to pay, and nobody complained. Iron discipline was maintained; if a cop decided to go for the Big Score, it was perfectly acceptable for the intended victim to go up the chain of command and file a grievance. It would be dealt with, and previous levels of renumeration would be restored.

This way of doing business has been maintained over the decades. Every Chicagoan learns through osmosis who to bribe, when to bribe them, and what the going rate is. If I get stopped by a Chicago cop while driving, the procedure is simple: I make my drivers’ license photo resemble that of another truly great Illinoisan, Hiram Ulysses Simpson Grant (to prove that inflation can take a toll on your looks, my license photo used to resemble Andrew Jackson). I carry a 50 on me at all times for this very purpose. If on the off-chance said policeman declines the offer, I proceed to look sheepish and tell him, “Sorry, I keep that there for emergencies like cash for a tow.” It’s simpler on everyone involved. The cop doesn’t have to write out the ticket. I don’t have to pay it. He and I don’t have to go to court in case I try to fight it. He gets a nice picture of an American hero for his time spent pointing out my infraction. I feel better because I don’t have to have a picture of a Republican in my wallet. Everyone wins.

And the attitude is reciprocal. Let me tell you why, in October, there’s going to be an announcement that we will be hosting the world in our front yard for a couple of weeks in 2016. We know who to bribe, when to bribe them, and what the going rate is. You thought that the IOC got a black eye from the shenanigans regarding the 2002 Winter Olympics? Those Mormons have nothing on us. We’ll give them what they want. That house near Cannes overlooking the nude beach? No problem. Oprah in a donkey show? She’ll do it. That small African nation you’ve had your eye on? We can make it happen. The Cariocas, Madrilenos, and Otaku have scruples. We’ve had them surgically removed at birth. Chicago delivers even better than Anonymous.

As you can probably tell by now, my point is this: Blago went for the Big Score. That’s his crime. And he got busted for it. He violated the fundamental nature of the system and paid the price. He should have known better. His father-in-law is a long-serving Chicago alderman. He was the protege of a Congressman who spent time behind bars for going after the Big Score and getting busted for it. We’re not upset because he’s corrupt. We’re upset because he’s a goddamn moron. We don’t like electing morons in Illinois. We’re the state that sent Everett Dirksen, Paul Douglas, and Paul Simon to the US Senate, not to mention a certain lecturer from Ye Olde Scrivener’s Alma Mater to the White House. It doesn’t make us look good.

Do we Chicagoans take pride in what you consider corruption? Yes. Yes, we do. It’s because of corruption that, in general, the city runs well. It’s clean, it’s relatively safe, the snow gets removed quickly, the garbage gets hauled out on a regular basis, we have a public transport system that’s the envy of most American cities, our roads get repaired on a regular basis, and our quality of life is improved. If you think that those things are your right as tax-paying citizens, then you’re not a Chicagoan. And you will never understand us. And if you don’t understand us, don’t pass judgement on us and on our politicians. We can do that perfectly well, by the standards that those politicans are expected to uphold. Our standards, not yours.

Last 5 posts by Eric Szulczewski

• More Pearls Before Swine - January 4th, 2009
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• Surrender is an Option - September 5th, 2008
• Obama, Opinions, Etc. - June 16th, 2008
• Unlike Grut, I Will Spoil It For You... - July 21st, 2007