Tag Archives: paper machete

A Silk Road to ruin: The Paper Machete – 10.05.13

Internet, Politics, ,

I’ve said this before but one of the reasons I like performing at The Paper Machete is its hard-and-fast deadline and word count. The show starts at 3pm. If I’m going to make it to The Green Mill on time to read my piece, it needs to be written no later than 130pm. There’s no bargaining, no extension unless I want to piss off the good people who run it. And unless I want to disrupt the flow of the show, I can’t go on and on for thousands of words.

Deadlines and limits make you creative. They force you to go places or try things you might not otherwise to get to your goal.

If I had more time to work on this piece, I probably would have made the ending seem less depressing or inevitable. I’d have found a middle ground. But it was 130pm and I had hit my word count and I still ended up with a piece I was really happy with.

—

Whatever you think of the FBI, you have to admire its flair for marketing.

On October 1st, the FBI arrested and subsequently put a name to the man behind a website called Silk Road. Silk Road was a two year old website through which one could buy and sell drugs. An internationally-known marketplace where approximately 1.2 billion dollars were exchanged over its life. Before it was shut down, the site had a user base of 900 thousand and had earned its owner – a man known only as The Dread Pirate Roberts – approximately $80 million in commissions and a writeup in Forbes, the first two words of which referred to Roberts as “an entrepreneur.”

That’s a big deal. And naturally if you’re the FBI you’d want to make a big deal about something like this. Now, criminal investigations are complicated things. They’re a mix of tireless work over long hours and a lot of luck. You don’t always get to pick your shots.

So perhaps a signed complaint asking a judge for an arrest warrant just four days before a government shutdown – which would curtail the FBI’s ability to, say, post a press release on its website about the arrest is entirely coincidental.

It’s entirely possible that the timing of the Dread Pirate Roberts’s arrest had nothing to do with the conclusion two days prior of America’s most beloved series about a murderous drug kingpin who poisons children. (OK, to be fair, it was just the one.)

I’m just saying an organization that maintains a list of “America’s Most Wanted” and produces daily radio shows has a flair for the dramatic.

Purely as a matter of scale, the shutdown of Silk Road is interesting. But it’s also interesting because of the technology that powered it. Silk Road users maintained their anonymity through the use of two technologies: a piece of software called Tor which allows everyone from journalists to NGOs to, yes, criminals use the Internet without revealing their actual, physical locations. And all Silk Road transactions were conducted using something called Bitcoin, a purely digital currency that uses cryptography and a series of electronic ledgers to blah blah blah nerd talk sci-fi Star Wars magical unicorns of money.

As interesting as the technical aspects of this story are, you came here for a mix of current events and social commentary mixed with some showmanship and bitcoin is like the band that plays before the burlesque dancers so I’m just going to skip to the parts where the gloves start coming off.

So big drug marketplace shutdown and an interesting statement on somewhat obscure technical tools for conducting anonymous, often illicit activities. But who cares, right? Tor, bitcoin, pirates. It’s hard to take something seriously when it sounds like a game of Dungeons and Dragons. None of you are looking to create a billion dollar drug empire…OK, maybe that guy. Also, Chad The Bird. I mean, obviously.

At first blush, the real impact of the Silk Road story is that the era of the Internet as a haven for criminal anonymous activities is over, especially with the NSA listening in on every message just short of “Do you like me, Circle Yes or No.”

No, the real lesson here is “The mythical permanent record we were all warned about in grade school has finally become real and it’s the Internet.”

You see, the government figured out the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually a guy named Ross Ulbricht. According to Ars Technica’s report on the government’s criminal complaint, the first mention of Silk Road was made by a user on a website called Shroomery.org. This same user posted a comment in a Bitcoin forum back in 2011 asking for some help with the nascent digital currency. This user’s account had an email address attached to it: “rossulbricht at gmail dot com.” This same Gmail address was attached to a Google Plus account which listed some of his favorite videos, some of which were from a place called the Mises Institute, which is named after an economist whose theories the Dread Pirate Roberts frequently cited as the basis for the larger philosophical ideas behind Silk Road. Similar references to these economic theories were also found on a LinkedIn account registered to Ulbricht.

For someone who masterminded a small drug empire using an untraceable digital currency, Ulbricht didn’t exactly cover his tracks very well. You could rightly argue that if you’re going to start selling drugs on the Internet, you shouldn’t do it with the same email address your aunt sends all her “THE TRUTH ABOUT OBAMA’S MUSLIMNESS” emails to.

It’s a little hard to blame Ulbricht for this behavior. After all, he’s no different than anyone else who leaves bits of his or her interests and views in various corners of the Internet. We used to be able to think of our lives as different circles of friends and family but for most people, the dream of keeping our personal lives and our professional lives separate died in a Facebook argument about the President’s birth certificate between a significant other and an aunt we never see. You can leave a job, but your former co-workers will continue to follow you. And it’s a lot harder to get over that bad breakup when someone’s Instagram account is just clicks away.

And thanks to the current nature of the Internet’s cloud architecture it’s all tied into a central username or email address for sheer convenience if nothing else. Argue, if you like, that Ulbricht was an idiot and if you and Chad The Bird were going to start a criminal enterprise, you would at least go to the trouble of creating a second email address. But who gets on the Internet for the first time thinking they’re going to create a criminal enterprise? Or cheat on their girlfriend? Or need to lie to their boss about calling in sick that day?

The problem isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about your privacy, it’s that we think we can hide in the sheer volume of conversation happening online right now. The Internet’s ubiquity has made everything we do on it seem ephemeral. A phrase like “the Internet of things” and gear like FitBit or Google Glass means we have – in a relatively short amount of time – gone from thinking of it as worldwide network of blogs and websites – to something we can wear on our faces or wrists or clip to our belts. Because it’s everywhere there’s the sense that no one will see us if we jot down a few thoughts in a notebook we literally tuck into our pocket, only showing them to a few people we know. Conversations on Facebook, Twitter or in comments sections have now become so ubiquitous they’ve come to feel like little more than a conversation we’re having with a friend on the bus or the train. We lean over and chat conspiratorially with a friend, confident that the stranger seated in front of us can’t hear and so what if they can anyway? Our stop is up next and we’ll be gone.

So while the details of the time you sat at a bar in college and rambled on about some obscure economic theory is…long forgotten by the time your 401K breaks $500, there’s usually a trail when you do the same thing online. And someone with the time and motivation to look for it can find it.

I’m not sure what the end game looks like here. Either we’re all going to end up truer, more honest versions of ourselves or everyone is going to end up hiding their online selves behind Tor and Bitcoin and the Internet will become the least social version of social media ever.

A different kind of leaning in: The Paper Machete 3.30.13

Politics, , , , ,

You can listen to me read this piece here on The Paper Machete/WBEZ podcast of the show. (I start at 4:31)

Here’s my piece from The Paper Machete this weekend. Deadlines are tough; I finished this minutes before I left to go to The Green Mill so the ending isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it works.

I’m also a little concerned this piece drifts into mansplaining but it’s at least grounded in fact, even if it has a healthy dose of barroom argument to it. There are lots of views on this topic so it’d be great to hear some comments on it.

If you liked this piece, please like The Paper Machete on Fcaebook or follow it on Twitter and attend one of its Saturday afternoon shows at The Green Mill. It’s the best weekly live event in Chicago and deserves your support.

—

On Tuesday, President Obama appointed Julia Pearson to head the Secret Service. She’s the first woman to ever lead the agency charged with protecting the life of the President, the Vice-President and other high-profile people in government. This historic change followed CIA director John Brennan’s selection of a woman to be acting head of the the agency’s Clandestine Service, the part of the agency that goes barreling into the most dangerous parts of the world, risks the lives of its members and can never tell anybody about it. And, of course, this past January the Defense Department lifted the ban on women serving on the front lines in our armed forces.

In short, 2013 has been a great year for putting more women in positions of power so long as those women don’t mind getting shot at. This is probably not what Sheryl Sandberg meant by “Lean In” but so be it. Finally, the decades-long struggle for equal treatment under the law has been fulfilled. If you want to express your support for this, you can change your Facebook profile picture to an image of Jessica Chastain’s character in Zero Dark Thirty.

On the one hand, it’s impossible to downplay these achievements. According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s Clandestine Service has “long been perceived as a male bastion that has blocked the career paths of women even while female officers have ascended to the top posts in other divisions.” The same is true of women in combat. It isn’t so much that women should have the right to stand alongside men in the most dangerous combat environments – although they should – but because those positions afford women the best opportunities for advancement and salary in the military. One might call it a “camouflage ceiling”…but only if one wanted to be rightfully mocked for sounding like a jackass.

As for the Secret Service, the image of it – both in reality and in the larger culture – has been wholly male. According to the New York Times, women make up only ten percent of all special agents, which is lower than most law enforcement agencies. Think of the Secret Service and the first image to pop into your head is a dude in a dark suit and dark sunglasses talking into his sleeve, thanks in part to TV and movies. Think of the Secret Service movie In The Line of Fire and you remember Clint Eastwood more readily than Renee Russo. Though a major motion picture gave us a black president at least ten years before it happened in real life, we didn’t get a movie with a woman as the head of the Secret Service – in this case, Angela Bassett in Olympus Has Fallen – until last week. The week before it happened for real.

This coincidence seems minor but it got me thinking that pop culture is replete with roles where women are President yet we’ve never had one in real life. Of course then I remembered when Hillary Clinton got a little choked up on the Presidential campaign trail in 2008. There was talk for days afterward about whether or not she was crying and if she – and, by extension, a woman – was tough enough to be President. Does Pierson as head of the Secret Service put that notion to rest? One would hope. After all, you’re probably tough enough to be the President if you’re tough enough to take a bullet for one.

While putting women in powerful/dangerous positions within the federal government and military puts the lie to the notion that women don’t have the temperament for certain kinds of work, it would be nice if we didn’t wait to put them there until after a bunch of guys turned it into a shit show.

If you’ll recall, the last time the Secret Service made big news was in 2012 when a group of special agents were preparing for the President’s visit to Cartagena. And when I say “preparing,” I mean “having sex with prostitutes” and subsequently arguing over price which is really depressing because you’d think an agency that was originally part of the U.S. Treasury would have a better understanding of currency exchange rates.

Also, the CIA hasn’t exactly been running the tightest ship either recently with former director David Petraeus resigning last year because had an affair with someone and people found out about it because he used Gmail to exchange secret messages with her instead of using Snapchat like really good spies do.

(I’m summarizing the Petraeus thing for the sake of brevity. You can read a full account of it at my website WhyWereWeSoObsessedWithThisFourMonthsAgo.com / SeriouslyWhoCaresNow )

So while putting women in these positions is great, they’re burdened with both the assumption that their presence alone will clean up institutions that have been old boy’s clubs for decades and the equally unfair expectation that because they’re the first they’re representing all women everywhere. Nobody assumes the next head of the CTA is going to bang his memoirist, for example, but when Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer stops letting people work from home it somehow has less to do with whether that’s a smart decision as a CEO trying to turn around the culture of a company best known for hosting your parents e-mail address and more to do with demonstrating to the larger world how a woman can “have it all” even though “all” is different for everybody and most people wouldn’t “want it” anyway.

Similarly, Sheryl Sandberg’s been taking it on the chin for her book Lean In, which discusses the structural and institutional barriers that keep women from getting ahead in the workforce. Rather than judging her arguments on their merits, most of the criticism centers on whether she’s properly representing the outlook of all working women, rather than just those at Fortune 500 companies.

Is Sandberg writing from a position of wealth and privilege? Sure. And there’s an argument to be made that her experience does not resemble every woman’s but I don’t think that was her intent. I’d even be OK with this line of criticism if it meant we were then making room on the bookshelves for women who make 30-50K a year or work at Target or are stay-at-home moms and sending them on extensive press tours. But somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

All of which brings me back to the woman who’s the new head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service. I have to keep saying “the woman” because most people don’t know her name. The reason for that is because she’s undercover. So while she’ll still be the first woman in her position, she’ll likely be judged more on her work and not her name or her background. After watching the press treatment of Mayer and Sandberg over the past few months, she’s probably pretty thankful for that.

Just the clip: The Paper Machete -10.12.2012

Media, ,

Here’s my piece from last weekend’s Paper Machete show.

Sometimes you write something and you’re not sure how it reads until it gets in front of an audience. One of the reasons I love doing Machete is I get that instant feedback. Of course, I usually do something pegged to a news event that week so there’s rarely a reason to go back and revise and make the piece better. It felt weird to do this piece so long after the event in question even if that was kind of the point. Still, I wished I came up with a better tag at the end.

—

Does it seem weird to anyone else that we’re no longer talking about how the highest-rated cable news channel in America broadcast a live suicide?

(Don’t worry, it gets funnier.)

I know, I know, it happened a whole two weeks ago and with the speed at which news operates it’s like I’m pestering you about something that happened during the Taft administration. And sure it seems like it was an honest mistake but where was…the processing? The part where we as a society collectively feel remorse after something like this happens and examine How We Got Here was just…missing. It was as if we got really shitcanned the night before but we’re somehow able to get up the next morning and run a triathalon. All of the whippets but none of the headache. Whatever concerns we might have had about how our insatiable thirst for destructive acts led us – even inadvertently – to witness a live suicide were gone once the next episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo aired. (Because if that’s not a show about people killing themselves – albeit very, very slowly – then I don’t know what is.)

I had my thinking on this retroactively confirmed when I went back and read a post Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan wrote about how terrible it was that Fox News was running live car chases in the first place, and how they were “mayhem porn” and what did they expect would happen? Of course, all of this would have had more impact if Gawker hadn’t posted the unedited suicide clip itself some 45 minutes before. As the Big Dog says, it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did. Nolan’s justification for airing the clip was as follows “When we heard that Fox News had aired a suicide, what was the first thing we all did? Search on the internet for the clip. The clip is news.”

I invite all of you to review your own Internet search history to determine what it is you think of as news.

Gawker’s misunderstanding is really very simple: The news is not that this suicide happened – as Gawker pointed out, an unhappy ending to a car chase is almost the point of airing it in the first place – the news is the context in which it occurred. But that’s the part of this story that’s missing on Gawker, Buzzfeed and almost everywhere else that posted just the clip under the guise of news. What made the clip newsworthy wasn’t the event itself but that it violated a standard Fox News had set (which, I know, “Fox has standards,” LOL!).

It isn’t clear in the clip why that happened, only that it did. So the clip has almost no newsworthy value except for the portion where Shepherd Smith tries to explain why it happened and apologizes for it. But of course that’s not going to get anyone riled up and talking. What allows most media to get away with this double standard is the way news is structured around outrage and how many forms of media serve to troll you 24/7.

The other day I was watching a local morning newscast and their teaser into the break went something like “Find out who is behind a controversial weapons and ammunition tax” as if there was some shadowy Illuminati pulling the strings. Turns out? It was Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board President and a more Establishment figure you will never find (her apparent sympathy for pot smokers aside). *

So nevermind that the city of Chicago has the highest homicide rate in years and maybe making guns and ammo more expensive is an idea worth exploring. No, we have to frame it as a plan with suspicious motives or it’s somehow less important and therefore we won’t be able to even feign interest. Similarly, television news is great at saying things like “This terrible thing has happened and it’s very offensive and right-thinking people everywhere object to it…Anyway, here it is.”

I was reminded of this listening to a recent interview with Gilbert Gottfried on Marc Maron’s podcast when Gottfried wondered if what he said about the Japanese tsunami was so offensive, why did most news outlets think it was OK to repeatedly say it or print it? The same holds true for Michael Richards’ yelling racial slurs at an audience. If saying certain things are so terrible that a man should lose his job, shouldn’t they be equally terrible to repeat? Or do they only become terrible upon repetition?

Maybe, in an unexpected way, there isn’t any harm in Gawker or Buzzfeed airing a clip of a guy killing himself when in our current media landscape these incidents aren’t really worth the import they’re given. They only seem that way because they’re everywhere now. Something isn’t just said, it’s retweeted, maybe hundreds of times and that amplification gives it an undeserved status as a topic worth discussing. And then a week later we wonder why we were so mad. We’re hit so often with stimuli that anything without an innate conflict is processed so fast by our brains that it’s out of our heads before we’ve had a chance to think it through. We move so quickly from one thing to the next that what passes for analysis is a blog post that’s written within an hour of the incident. So everything has to come with a little outrage attached. It’s not enough for Newsweek to run a story about the 101 best places to eat in the world. It has to run that story with a cover image of a woman fellating asparagus.

Or that appears to be the expectation many news organizations have of their audiences. Yet even Gawker must have felt some hesitation about reveling in the same mud it decried. On every post it publishes, you can see how many views and comments it’s garnered. But neither the post with the clip or the subsequent high-horse commentary displayed it. Some things are better not known.

At some point, I hope we sort this out. When everything is an outrage, then nothing is. And it would be nice to have the time to sort out the true harm from the completely inane before the next…OH COME ON! BIG BIRD IS GETTING FIRED? THIS…IS…BULLSHIT!

* Upon re-reading this, I’ve taken a bit of poetic license here. “You will never find” is going a bit far, even for the sake of a good line.

Playboy, party of one: The Paper Machete 04.28.2012

Media, , ,

Here’s my piece from last week’s Paper Machete. You can read my previous pieces for the Machete here. (UPDATE: WBEZ has the audio of this piece here.)

Back in 2009, I wrote and performed a piece about life at Playboy for You, Me, Them, Everybody (before it was a talk show when it was an evening of readings and performances). None of my other ideas for that night panned out so I threw a framework around a few anecdotes I’d share at parties about work. The best thing I can say about my performance is…I met the lead singer of White Mystery that night and she was really cool. The piece was a dud. Didn’t play well in the room and reading it three years later I can see why. I come across as pompous and the piece has nothing interesting to say about me or the experience of working there. (I never posted it.)

I’d always wanted to revisit Playboy as a topic and talk less about what it was like to work there and more about where that brand is in the current cultural landscape. But the press coverage I’d garnered thanks to tweeting (and talking) about my departure earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Playboy so writing about it would mean writing less about my very brief time there and more about what happened since then.

My appearance at The Paper Machete last week coincided with the last days of Playboy in Chicago and followed a mash note from Hugh Hefner to the city in the Chicago Tribune. I finally felt like I had something worthwhile to say and Christopher Piatt – the EIC of the Machete – liked my pitch so it seemed time to revisit the topic. The Machete keeps to a strict word count for time and this is one of those pieces where I was both writing up until my deadline but also struggling to get all the ideas in without going over. Part of me wants to have another go at it but once you connect with the ball you don’t linger, you just head to first.

—

There are few things sadder than throwing your own going-away party. But that’s exactly what Hugh Hefner did this past Sunday in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. To mark the departure of Playboy magazine’s editorial operations for Los Angeles, America’s horniest octogenarian threw one last party via an 800 word, misty-eyed eulogy to Playboy’s nearly 60 years in Chicago.

He was one of the few who marked the occasion. There was no retrospective in the city’s glossy culture magazines, no historical timeline in either of the daily newspapers. Even television news, which rarely passes on an opportunity to cover newsworthy nudity, didn’t seem particularly interested. Aside from an op-ed here or radio segment there, Playboy’s departure from the city of its birth went largely unnoticed.

Perhaps it’s because you only get one going-away party. Playboy, for all intents and purposes, left Chicago in the mid-1970s when Hefner – after decades in the first Playboy Mansion on State Street – headed west to establish a new mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Now, before I go on I want to offer some disclosure: From March of 2009 to March of 2010, I worked for Playboy.com, first as its Senior Editor then as is its Director of Content. I stopped working as Playboy.com’s Director of Content when Playboy…ordered me to. More specifically someone from HR ordered me to in a conversation that featured the words “severance” and “can stay until the end of the day…if you want.” But the year in between was a lot of fun. It’s hard to bear too much ill will toward a job that once asked me to write a script for something called “Playboy’s Naked Yoga.” That’s right, I said a script.

Any personal animus I might bear toward the organization is tempered with affection. I’m more a fan of Chicago than almost anything and knowing this city was the birthplace of THE iconic magazine brand of the 20th century ought to be a point of pride for anyone who calls Chicago home and particularly for someone like me who’s spent his formative working years in media.

In his Tribune piece, Hefner offered a detailed highlight reel of the magazine’s first 20 years in Chicago including the Hyde Park apartment where he laid out the first issue, the first Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959 at the old Chicago Stadium, the first Playboy Club in 1960, and the company’s move into the Palmolive Building in 1965 with its nine foot high letters spelling out Playboy. And then the following:

By the mid-1970s, I moved to Los Angeles, the land where my dreams had come from, but Chicago remained the company’s base, headquartered in the Lake Shore Drive offices we’ve occupied since 1989.

Now, after nearly 60 years, the Playboy offices in Chicago have closed as we consolidate our operations in Los Angeles.

So by Hef’s own admission, there’s been nothing worth mentioning about Playboy’s time in Chicago since the first Bush administration. At least from his point of view.

And this is exactly the problem with Playboy magazine: It’s all from his point of view and long ago stopped leading the culture in favor of following it. Last month’s cover promised features on The Walking Dead, Bruno Mars, Jon Hamm and Meghan McCain. Contemporary, sure. But territory most other modern major magazines had already covered.

In the book Mr Playboy author Steven Watts quotes Hefner as saying  “I’ve always edited the magazine for myself, on the assumption that my tastes are pretty much like those of our readers. This was fine when Hef was in his 30s. But now a magazine that’s supposed to be about contemporary culture and aspiration is trapped in amber, held hostage by a 84 year old who long ago sought to wall himself off from the concerns of the everyday man.

I can’t remember where I read it now but Hefner said he moved into the Chicago mansion, in part, because it allowed him to centralize his work and social lives. This freed him, he said, from worrying about pedestrian things like how he was going to get to work or what he was going to wear that day. I suppose life is easier when you can go to work in your pajamas. But eventually the young men who were Playboy’s core audience – and had to worry about things like wearing pants and getting to work on time – realized Hef and his magazine didn’t have much to say to them. Do people still want to visit the Mansion in L.A.? Sure. But people still want to visit Disneyworld. But nobody ever talks about wanting to live there.

A couple years ago, Playboy’s CEO said the company was going to shift to “brand management” as its core strategy with an emphasis on opening new Playboy Clubs around the world. Essentially, Playboy as a company was going to be about being Playboy. The trouble is the modern Playboy brand – particularly the clubs – isn’t all that strong. Last year’s NBC TV show “The Playboy Club” – a show about its Hefnerian heyday that essentially said life stopped being cool after the 1960s – got yanked off the air after three episodes. Rumors of a Chicago Playboy Club re-opening after a 20 year absence turned out to be little more than trumped-up publicity for the show. Even The Playboy Club casino at the Palms in Las Vegas is closing. It almost sounds like a bad joke. “Your mama’s so dumb she couldn’t even keep a Playboy Club open in Las Vegas.”

Two events last year symbolized both Playboy’s reversal of fortune over the past couple decades and its reaction to it. First, Playboy sold off its online business to a company called Manwin. You’ve probably never heard of Manwin but they run a whole bunch of websites that offer free porn on the Internet. It’s exactly the kind of company that’s made it hard for Playboy to make money online. So hard that Playboy decided to get out of the business altogether then turn around and sell it to the very people who put them in that position in the first place. Also notable was Hefner’s decision to take Playboy from a publicly-traded company available on the New York Stock Exchange to a private company controlled largely by him. It was yet another example of Hef doing everything he can to turn inward keep his world free from external forces.

So if this week’s end of Playboy’s party in Chicago was met with a collective shrug it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The party’s location was really far away and seemed like it’d been over for a while now. Plus, Hef was the only one on the list.

NBC and Chelsea, lately: The Paper Machete 11.19.2011

Media, , ,

Here’s my piece from last week’s Paper Machete. You can read my previous pieces for the Machete here.

This piece pretty much speaks for itself but keep in mind I write this to read them so the italics, the caps, etc. are more cues for me as I’m reading than proper written form. Also, I wish the story about NBC wanting to do a sitcom with the Muppets had come out last week because, boy, it really sells my point better than anything. (I had lots more to say about the NBC/Muppets arrangement on Twitter today.)

—

This week, NBC Nightly News announced it hired Chelsea Clinton as a correspondent for “Making A Difference,” its series of heartwarming feature stories. This was really good news because woo! Someone in media is hiring! Or rather, someone…is hiring.

Before I sat down to work on this piece I thought “This is not a big deal. The real issue here is the larger story about how NBC’s news and entertainment divisions are completely lacking in ideas that aren’t brought to them by a bold-faced name” – an idea I promise you I’ll get back to in a moment. But then I finally read the New York Times report that broke the story and I can understand why media critics, bloggers and people on barstools everywhere all turned into little howler monkeys over the news.

Back in July, “an intermediary” contacted Steve Capus, the president of NBC News to tell him Chelsea Clinton was “kicking around what she wanted to do next.” This is amazing for a couple of reasons: 1) In 2011, someone can describe looking for a job with the same words I used in 1997 to discuss hippies on the quad…

And 2) If you found yourself both in need of a job and employing an intermediary wouldn’t you just lay off the intermediary and save yourself both the money and the trouble of getting a job?

But it gets worse. The president of NBC News starts the conversation – and I can’t emphasize this enough THIS IS THE PRESIDENT OF NBC NEWS – by asking “What are you interested in doing?” This is the equivalent of him sliding a piece of paper over to her and saying “We’d like you to take this piece of paper and write down a number…and a job description…and the number of weekly spa appointments you’d like us to make for you. And that! Is our final offer.”

The article goes on to say that “One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it.” which again says to me you really ought to think of firing your intermediary but also if there’s anyone to blame for the public’s lack of awareness of Chelsea Clinton’s profile-raising…that person is Chelsea Clinton. Not only did Chelsea refuse to make herself available for comment after NBC’s announcement, she also – while in the process of campaigning for her mother’s run for the Presidency in 2008 – refused not only questions from the national press but also a question from a 4th grade reporter for Scholastic News who dared to ask her how good of a First Man her Dad would be if her mom was President. To that question, Chelsea replied: “I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately.” Burrrrnnnn….

To be fair to Chelsea, she did participate in a press release. In it she said “I hope telling stories through ‘Making a Difference’ will help me to live my grandmother’s adage of ‘Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you.’ ”

Look, I don’t want to shit on anybody’s grandma…but that kinda crap is what privileged people say when they don’t need to do anything but wait for things to happen to them. The president of NBC News said “Hey, do you want a job?” And Chelsea said “Yeah” and now, Chelsea, you’re going to do be on NBC News because of something that happened to you after your intermediary made a phone call when you were “kicking around what to do next.” When you are Chelsea Clinton or the children of Tim Russert or John McCain or George W. Bush, life is only about what happens to you. You don’t actually have to go out and make stuff happen. You just wait for someone at NBC to say “Hey, do you wanna work here?”

Because when you’re NBC, you hope that familiarity doesn’t so much breed contempt as it does ratings. This year, NBC famously rolled out three shows to much fanfare: The Playboy Club, a show about pretty much what it sounds like; Prime Suspect, a reimagining of a popular British television show and Whitney, a sitcom built around a woman best known as the sidekick of Chelsea Handler, the late-night cable TV comedian. The Playboy Club was cancelled after three episodes and Prime Suspect is dead as well though Whitney is still around despite…I swear I tried to come up with an explanation here or a joke or something but seriously no one knows why the fuck this show is still on the air.

This insistence on television as a security blanket even extends to NBC’s midseason replacements. In a list of upcoming shows on nbc.com are shows based on a book by Chelsea Handler, a reality show about wild and crazy senior citizens starring Betty White, a reality show about fashion starring Elle McPherson and finally a show called The Firm which, yes, is based on the John Grishman novel WHICH CAME OUT ALMOST 20 YEARS AGO.

Unfortunately for NBC, cliches – especially the one about familiarity and contempt – are often true for a reason. New York magazine’s Vulture blog recently released…uh, a slideshow that detailed Nielsen’s recent ratings book and the news was not good for NBC. The network has zero shows in Nielsen’s list of the 40 most-watched shows on TV. Zero. Out of 40.

If you listen to my dad, the problem with America is it doesn’t make anything anymore. NBC has a similar problem. Its fortunes rise or fall on the strength of brands it has little connection to and that mean more to most people than the network itself with the exception of Chelsea Clinton’s future colleague Brian Williams, the current NBC Nightly News anchor and host of the newsmagazine show Rock Center, which is such an awful title you have to imagine that Brian Williams Is Handsome, Smart And Such A Nice Boy was running a close second. NBC’s made Williams into an almost one-man viral video generator, having him appear on The Today Show, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock and Jay Leno. For a network devoid of product it can call its own, this is an incredibly smart move. According to Vulture’s…slideshow, under Williams, NBC Nightly News is averaging more viewers than all but two of its shows. Sure this is like raving about the turd with the most polish on it, but the fact remains NBC’s most important brand is its news. A brand it decided was best served by the addition of Chelsea Clinton, who once refused to answer a 4th grade reporter’s question.

Maybe if NBC’s lucky, she’ll agree to stick around until Malia and Sasha get tall enough for the camera.

A flash mob of inspiration – Paper Machete – June 11, 2011

Fatherhood, , , ,

One of these days I’ll develop the discipline to write longer pieces here independent of a local reading series (for shorter, more frequent posts check out my Tumblr blog) but until then here’s the piece I read at Paper Machete this weekend. If you’re in Chicago and haven’t checked it out, next Saturday at 3pm is as good a reason as any: the show moves to larger digs at The Horseshoe in Lincoln Square and features Chicagoan/SNL cast member Paul Brittain and Schadenfreude’s Kate James.

This piece is about the recent string of downtown Chicago robberies that many are calling “flash mobs.” I get into why this is a misnomer and the lazy reporting that got them tagged this way. Plus, links to relevant material! Sadly, you will have to wait for the podcast to hear my “caveman” voice.

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Well, this is quite the flash mob we have going here today.

That’s what a flash mob is, right? Groups of otherwise unconnected strangers, driven by text messages or social media communication who gather together for some event? I know I invited all my friends via Twitter, Facebook and text. And The Paper Machete has a website where they talked about today’s lineup. Plus, there was something on The AV Club.

Plus, it’s not like any of us already has some kind of loose affiliation or acquaintance? Right…? Gang…?

I’m obviously getting ahead of myself but I do want to talk about how all of a sudden a term meant to describe seemingly-spontaneous coordinated dancing or shitty fake improv suddenly became the hot new trend in violent muggings in the tony Gold Coast and Streeterville neighborhoods. And like most annoying trends it seems to have started in Brooklyn.

But let me back up and set the scene here: We’ve had a longtime Daddy figure for a mayor replaced by a younger guy who’s untested in the role, a city with a $650 million dollar deficit contributing to economic decline in the city’s neighborhoods and a police force with 800 fewer cops than there ought to be and a superintendent who’s barely been on the job for a month – and wasn’t officially approved for the job until earlier this week. Tack on reports of downtown youth violence robberies during the last few months and whispers of potential violence causing the Memorial Day weekend closing of North Avenue Beach and things. were. just. a. little. tense. leading up to last weekend.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 12 crimes involving large groups of young men – half were robberies and the other half were non-violent crimes – occurred last weekend in the Streeterville/Gold Coast area. Of the robberies, five of them were committed by the same group of people and ten of the people in that group were arrested. 19 other young men were arrested for the other six, non-violent crimes.

While these crimes and their victims are very real, the organization of the groups through social media has been overreported. Or perhaps reported is the wrong word. On Wednesday, a Chicago Police Department spokesman said there was no indication any of the assaults or robberies were coordinated using social media. So maybe the word we’re looking for here is “completelymadeup.”

So how did these attacks end up reported as “flash mobs”? This brings us back to Brooklyn. And 40 cent hot wings.

In October of 2009, a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Brooklyn started running a Tuesday night special: hot wings – 40 cents each, which based on my extensive Google-based research of hot wings menus is about a 20-50 cent savings over the price of your average wing. What was later described in the New York Times as an unauthorized flyer discussing the special was posted to various social networking sites and caused an increasing number of teenagers to overwhelm the spot over the next three weeks, culminating in a Veteran’s Day Eve melee in the area around the mall that ended with two shootings and one stabbing. This was followed by other non-poultry-related incidents involving large groups of youth in Philadelphia and South Orange, N.J., in 2010 and, more recently, robberies in St. Paul, Minnesota and St Louis earlier this year though few of these mention any social media involvement. Let’s just say they…fit the description.

So back to Chicago. We’ve got a national context for two years of sporadic violent incidents involving youth, which are, in some cases, coordinated using text messaging and social media. It’s a meme, as the Internet would say. Then while doing research for this piece I remembered a report from CBS 2 back in March about businesses along the Magnificent Mile experiencing groups of teens coming into their stores grabbing as much as they can and running away. “Apparently, they’ve been Tweeting each other,” said the reporter. There it is: Twitter was to blame. Despite the lack of direct quotes from police, the victims or the alleged attackers mentioning any form of social media. And nevermind that plenty of people who use Twitter or Facebook manage to get through their days without knocking over a Filene’s Basement.

And that’s when it all came together for me. This has way more to do with the Gold Coast and what it represents and social media and what it represents. And it can all be explained by a little something called terror management theory.

[OK truth be told I’m only saying this because I heard about terror management theory for the first time on Wednesday while listening to the How Stuff Works podcast and it sounded really cool. Had my iPod shuffled differently during my morning commute I might be telling you the only way to truly understand these attacks is to listen to the Sound Opinions review of the new Fleet Foxes album. But hang with me and I swear this will make a kind of sense.]

Terror management theory essentially posits that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality and that every societal construct we create is meant to distract us from a fear of death: political parties, saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, even Bravo’s The Real Housewives series which is ironic because every time I remember that show exists I want to fucking kill myself.

According to this theory, symbols that enforce our cultural views are fiercely protected and anything that threatens those views is dealt with in a highly punitive manner.

Now, think of the Gold Coast and Streeterville, where these attacks occurred. What’s over there? Tiffany’s, Water Tower Place, the American Girl store, parks, countless tourist attractions and various economic engines for the city. Basically, high affluence in a low-crime area. For a city that wants to convince itself it isn’t broke and suffering from an increase in gang activity, you don’t get much more symbolic.

So how does social media enter into the picture? On almost every level, social media is changing the way we communicate and learn about our world. Rather than reinforce the individual societal constructs we have in place in our families, neighborhoods or countries, social media is exposing us to yes, congressional penis, but also cultural worldviews that differ wildly from our own. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: On the day after the next court ruling on gay marriage, gun rights or abortion, visit the Facebook page of any family member you purposely only see at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s the interpersonal equivalent of finding a potentially cancerous mole on a part of your body you can’t see without a mirror.

Flash mobs make the perfect scapegoat. They’re symbolic of technology many people don’t understand and are still struggling to legislate and use to create new economic models. And if it wasn’t flash mobs, it would have been something else. When I was a kid, blue star LSD tattooswere the neighborhood bogeyman. For my parents, I think it was communists. I’m sure even cavemen were like “Have you heard of this new form of fire that can start by rubbing two sticks together? Someone really needs to start monitoring the sale of sticks.”

Census, not consensus: Paper Machete, January 9, 2011

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I was back at The Paper Machete yesterday to discuss Chicago’s mayoral race.

Every time I attend The Paper Machete, I’m stunned at the level of talent on display. I’ve been to four shows – three of which I performed at – and if there is a show which consistently showcases such an incredibly talented group of writers and musicians of greater intelligence and humor, I haven’t seen it. Christopher Piatt and Allison Weiss put this on weekly, people. WEEKLY! And it’s free. FREE! You’re missing out if you don’t give it a chance. Check out the Facebook page or their podcasts.

A couple notes on this piece: Thanks to some smart feedback from Piatt, I wrote this specifically to be read as a speech rather than as a true essay that would be read. So I’m not sure how well it works just as plain text. If it makes it into the Machete podcast, I’ll link and you’ll see what I mean. UPDATE: The recording of this piece is posted here.

Also, after I performed it I thought it came off too pro-Rahm, which wasn’t my intention (and certainly isn’t reflected in the previous Machete piece I wrote). Chicago’s neighborhoods have many needs and I don’t think a pro-business mayor is what we need right now. But that doesn’t excuse the played-out games our city’s black leaders are engaged in this year. They need to get their collective act together for 2015.

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My friends, can I take you into my confidence for a moment? I have a confession to make.

I’ve lived in the Chicago area my whole life and in the city proper for 13 years now. I’m politically aware to the point of being able to tell you roughly how much some of the candidates had in their campaign coffers at the start of this campaign and I’m old enough to not only have been alive when there wasn’t a mayor named Daley but to have actual memories of a few of them.

But for a couple minutes last night while I was working on this piece, I had to look up how a contested Chicago mayoral election works. Isn’t that embarrassing? I’m like one of those people who don’t know there used to be a Meigs Field. Or that Lake Shore used to go around the east side of Soldier Field. Or…something else with a field.

Anyway, I don’t feel too bad for not remembering how mayoral elections work in the post-Daley era since the recent actions of Chicago’s black political leaders showed they don’t seem to remember either what with all their efforts to rally around a consensus candidate.

So just in case you too have a lack of field-related Chicago knowledge, elections in Chicago used to work pretty much how most other elections go: There was a Democratic primary and a Republican primary and the winners of each of those primaries would run against each other in the general election…and the person who was the Democrat won.

But in 1995, the Illinois General Assembly changed the law to do away with primaries in the mayoral election. To understand why they did this involves me explaining the last 35 years of Chicago mayoral political history. You’d think that with 21 of those years involving Daley in the mayor’s office that it would be pretty easy but the 13 years prior to that are a mess of Democratic white guys being so mad at black guys that they were willing to elect a lady and even a white Republican if it meant keeping a black Democrat out of the mayor’s chair. Also, there’s a really bad snowstorm involved. It’s actually really interesting but in an effort to not have us here all day, just trust me when I say the big takeaway is this: Most people think the election of Harold Washington – by the way, he was the black guy – means that in non-Daley years all the black political leaders in Chicago need to do is decide on one black candidate to run for mayor and he or she will win.

Since the four leading four candidates for mayor are Rahm Emanuel, Carol Moseley Braun, Miguel Del Valle, and Gery Chico – or to put it terms of jokes you might hear involving rowboats: a white guy, a black lady and two Hispanic guys – things should be easy-peasy, right? No. They’re uh…hardy-tardy.

See, there’s never been a mayoral election under the non-primary system when Daley wasn’t running. So there’s no real evidence to support the idea that a black candidate could win against a white challenger. Also, the racial makeup of this city isn’t what it used to be.

According to an article in the Chicago News Cooperative, the most recent census estimates available say that “whites and blacks each represent almost one-third of the city’s population, while Hispanics have held steady at about 27 percent and Asians rose slightly to comprise a little more than 5 percent of Chicagoans.”

So first of all: bad news for racist white people: You’re more of a minority than ever but still not eligible to get in on all those fat city contracts for minority-owned businesses. Also, bad news for black political leaders still partying like it’s 1989: the black population has shrunk considerably to the point where it’s no longer feasible to decide on a black consensus candidate and think he or she will be elected mayor.

Ah but not so fast, you say! Just because the city’s population splits evenly down white and black lines doesn’t mean the voter rolls do, you retort in a manner most self-satisfied! Moreover, you say, 2008 voter turnout showed only 37 percent of white people vs. 40 percent of black people and 12.86 percent of Hispanics. And finally, black turnout has always been very strong and so you say good day sir I’ll have no more of your empty punditry.

To which I say, not so fast you jackanapes! We are not just talking about any white person. We are talking about Rahm Emanuel. This is a guy who has a power base of business interests, a ton of money and a mythical persona that’s something like Jewish George Clooney-meets-Ben Kingsley’s character in “Sexy Beast.”

And if we’re just going to look at this purely in racial terms, Emanuel’s been polling well for months among blacks and Hispanics. A recent poll – taken after Braun became the consensus candidate – shows he not only has a 3:1 lead among white voters, but a 16-point lead among Hispanics, too. And here’s the kicker: Braun’s only pulling 43 percent of the black. Emanuel’s pulling 32. So he’s working all sides of the census form.

Things would be different if the black consensus candidate had more universal appeal. Or, let’s face it, was not Carol Moseley Braun. As much as I’d like to see a strong black candidate, were I to enumerate all of the mistakes Carol Moseley Braun has made since she started campaigning – or hell, even just this week – we would be here until the runoff. So I think I’ll just quote Braun’s spokeswoman – a woman who is paid to say nice things about her candidate – who this week said “Am I a little nervous when she starts to talk to people? Yes, I am.”

According to that same recent poll, Braun’s foot in mouth disease has now translated into a 41 percent unfavorable rating. Unfortunately, she also has a 91% name recognition which – according to the pollsters – means she is “a candidate with little ability to grow her vote share.”

Which is why that poll shows Emanuel leading with 42 percent of the vote, Braun with 26, Chico with 10 and Del Valle with 7.

At this point, Rahm Emanuel could change his campaign slogan to “Rahm Emanuel: Lick My Balls” and he’d still probably win.

Here’s the thing most people forget about Harold Washington: he won his first election for mayor – the most racially-charged election in the city’s history – with 20 percent of the white vote. I’ve got concerns with Rahm Emanuel as mayor when we need less of a downtown mayor and more of a neighborhood mayor. But demographically, you could argue that he – not Braun – is the candidate with broad support from all over Chicago. And that’s what it’s going to take to win from now on: not a consensus candidate, but a census candidate.

2015 – Paper Machete, October 16, 2010

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Been a busy and difficult month and I’m going to make an effort to get back to documenting the pregnancy as there’s been a lot to discuss. But here’s a reading I did yesterday at The Paper Machete, a live weekly magazine show (or a salon in a saloon). If you’re in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood any given Saturday at 3pm, stop by Ricochet’s for the show. It’s really a great example of Chicago’s living artistic bar culture.

This reading – about the Chicago mayoral race – ended up very much like a blog post due to the way my brain is wired to write about current events like this. So it felt right to post it here, with links. Reading it again, it reads pretty rough on Fioretti and Emanuel but that’s mainly because this is the most important mayoral race in two decades and there’s been little from either of them on issues of crime, poverty, the city budget, etc. so far. As voters, we should demand more.

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Immediately after Mayor Daley’s September 7th announcement that he would not seek re-election, everything we thought we knew about Chicago politics seemed wrong. Early on, the city seemed destined to become a Rubik’s Cube of shifting coalitions, alliances and power structures: a campaign that wouldn’t be so much a horse race as a rodeo. Typifying this anything-goes mentality was an announcement on September 20th from Alderman Sandi Jackson that both she and her husband Jesse Jackson Jr were each considering a run for mayor…until the Sun-Times ran a story the next day that clotheslined them both with some untoward allegations.

Now, when I say “early on” consider that this happened less than a month ago but seems like such ancient history that if you ask most people what Jackson Jr. was accused of, all they’ll be able to come up with is something akin to a Google search: “Uh…Blagojevich, senate seat, blond in a bikini.”

Since then the field has narrowed considerably but there are still plenty of questions. EarlyandOften.org lists 55 candidates who, in the last month, were either circulating, considering, rumored to be considering or just wanted their name in the papers. MayoralScoreCard.com now has the field down to 12 candidates running and five circulating. Of the candidates who are running, five don’t have any cash on hand and the candidates who are circulating range from Rev. James Meeks and Sheriff Tom Dart – both of whom could cause some momentous shifts in the weeks ahead – to Carol Moseley Braun whose campaign started 262 thousand dollars in the hole so her efforts look less like running for office and more like a bake sale peddling stale Rice Krispie treats.

So with nominating petitions due in little less than a month and those early volcanic predictions far in the rearview, what on paper still seems like a potentially vibrant race is currently giving us two leading declared candidates: 2nd Ward Alderman Robert Fioretti and former Chief of Staff Rahm “Fucking” Emanuel. But even these gentlemens’ campaigns could charitably be described as “still getting their shit together.”

This week, Fioretti announced that he would be out of the game for two weeks because he needed to get his tonsils out. Yes, nothing says “Ready To Lead On Day One” like an image of Fioretti ringing the nurse for some ice cream. Depending on how ridiculous things get, we might end up reading some racially-coded item in Michael Sneed’s column about how Fioretti ordered Neapolitan flavored ice cream because he’s committed to being a mayor for all the people of Chicago be they white, black, brown or strawberry.

As for Rahm Emanuel, NBC’s The Ward Room reported yesterday that the candidate sent his supporters a letter soliciting volunteers to circulate nominating petitions this weekend. The letter began: “Dear First Name.”

The funny thing is, the most interesting things about the Rahm Emanuel campaign are happening online and most of it doesn’t involve the candidate at all. Sure, Rahm’s got 29,000 Likes on Facebook and got out there early with a fancy, but familiar-looking website done up in a style that, if it were a font, would be described as Obama Hope Extra Bold, but that’s somewhat overshadowed by what’s happening on Twitter where the campaign appears to have gone through three Twitter accounts in the last two weeks, losing whatever momentum he built up each time. The lack of a definitive presence in this space means that the fake @MayorEmanuel parody account has four times as many followers as the official @RahmEmanuel account and is beating him on matters of openness and transparency as well: The real Rahm had nothing to say on the “Dear First Name” problem while the fake Rahm said “Dear First Name, Plouffe assures me that we’re going to have an actual fucking communications team in place soon. The intern is a cocktard.”

There’s even a website called rahmfacts.com and even though A) there appear to be only ten facts in total and B) they’re all true they still read as if they’re about a mythical Chuck Norris-ian political figure:

RAHM EMANUEL TELLS PEOPLE TO FUCK OFF BY SHOWING THEM THE SPACE WHERE HIS RIGHT MIDDLE FINGER USED TO BE

WE WOULD ALL HAVE HEALTHCARE IF BILL CLINTON HAD LISTENED TO RAHM EMANUEL’S ADVICE

RAHM EMANUEL REGULARLY CALLS HIS CHILDREN “MESHUGANAS”

This is all Very Exciting…and yet it isn’t. People who are true fans of democracy and reform should be more excited by a rough Chicago election than fake Twitter accounts if change is going to be less of a noun and more of a verb. Before Mayor Daley announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, it looked as if we’d get exactly that. Four long-serving Daley allies in the City Council announced they would not seek re-election and a handful of reform-minded potential candidates including Fioretti, 1st Ward Alderman Manny Flores, 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waugespack, State Rep John Fritchey, Congressman Mike Quigley and City Inspector General David Hoffman all seemed poised to run.

While there are some hints that Rahm would be a reform candidate, specifically a meeting last month with Fritchey and an announcement that Rahm supports listing the city’s TIF slush funds in the actual budget and not in the traditional second set of cooked books, there’s been little to suggest he wouldn’t continue Daley’s pro-business, big-splash, downtown-based style of rule. Progressives from the SEIU Illinois State Council to Progress Illinois think Rahm would be, at best, a liberal moderate who supports business interests. Money equals power and the former Daley fundraiser and investment banker is toting around about $1.2 million of it right now.

All of which helps explain why Wags, Fritchey, Quigley and Hoffman all pulled a musical chairs and sat down before Fioretti even heard the music stop. This week Flores bowed out and threw his support to former Chicago S
chool Board president Gerry Chico while Congressman Luis Guiterrez declared he wasn’t running either. Ramsin Canon of Gapers Block points out Guiterrez’s announcement came on the heels of a meeting with Dart and there’s still the possibility of a black coalition forming to challenge Rahm. Some of these meetings and deals might amount to something but at this point I’ve seen more stable alliances during three-legged races at church picnics, which means we’ll have a slate of weak candidates and one very strong one. IIf recent history is any indication, Chicago will hold its nose and vote for the Daley-like Rahm because, damnit, Millennium Park is pretty even if it is for tourists and who wants snow on the streets in February?

There are many months left in this campaign but what started out as the most interesting Chicago mayoral race in twenty-three years now looks to be the least interesting race in the next five. That’s probably what Fritchey, Wags and the rest foresaw when they beat a strategic retreat. Most political strategists will tell you that having something to run against is as important as having something to run for. All the people who were rumored to be planning “reform” runs for mayor had something to run against when Daley was still in the race. Now they don’t. A few well-placed stump speeches about money for more cops on the street and the evils of TIFs and Rahm becomes the great white hope. Better for the reform crowd to bide their time now, not waste talent and treasure in a losing campaign, firm up the new coalitions, wait for Rahm to get blamed for most of Daley’s mess then swoop in after a few years and save the day.

But Canon – in the first of a series of posts titled “Modeling An Open Chicago” – argues the best way for Chicagoans to take their city back isn’t for us to wait on a new Harold Washington to lead the disenfranchised into a new coalition in 2015 but to strengthen the neighborhood-based structures that already exist and return economic development back to the neighborhoods.

Of course, this requires much more than voting. It requires attending CAPS meetings, joining local school councils or neighborhood planning associations and stepping foot inside our ward offices for more than just parking permits.

When that happens, a candidate on Twitter who sends out letters addressed to “Dear First Name” will be a leader without followers. And that’s just a guy taking a walk.

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One last note on this piece: I realized afterward that there were workers from both the Fioretti and Emanuel campaigns in the audience, which…yeah.

UPDATE: Is Rahm Clearing The Field?