Tag Archives: Chicago

This is Sick

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The post above was made on his personal social media account by the man 77 million Americans sent back to the Oval Office. It was repeated by the official account of the White House. It is literally a declaration of war by Donald Trump on a major America City. MAGA apologists have been scrambling to pass it off as a joke, a cute and meaningless quip. It is not.

This is simply disgusting.

The meme Trump posts is a take on a scene from the movie Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic set during the war in Vietnam. That’s the war Trump sat out, having found a doctor to write him a medical excuse saying he could not serve because he had “bone spurs.” Fifty-Eight thousand Americans died in that war. Most had been involuntarily drafted.

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Chicago and the DNC

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The 2024 Democratic National Convention is about to begin in my hometown. I am worried.

In the summer of 1968, I was between my junior and senior years in high school. After a string of the usual summer jobs, delivering clothes for the local tailor, bagging groceries at the local supermarket, this summer I had a “real” job. I was writing computer programs for the City of Chicago. It was a big secret in those days that if you ignored a parking ticket in Chicago, you would never hear from the city. That was because the city’s traffic court, which had a crew of one hundred patronage workers dutifully typing the data from each ticket and each mailed in payment onto computer punched cards, no one had written the programs to match the two card decks and print out notices threatening arrest to the scofflaws who hadn’t paid.

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