Fast Food Philosophy From Suburban Chicago

Everything you really need to know can be gleaned from the marquees of fast food emporiums.


Philosophic maundering from one of the nicest pizza purveyors in Niles, Illinois:

What my Greek psychiatrist prescribed for my panic attacks:

Why Are U.S. Marines Training in a Chicago Park?

A very odd sight today at high noon in the Chicago Park District's River Park on Foster Avenue.

A group of uniformed Marines from the nearby North Park Reserve Training Center at 3034 W. Foster, dressed in urban camouflage fatigues, were undergoing training exercises in a civilian city park under the hot sun, at noon on a beautiful July Sunday.

First time we've ever seen that.

Under the watchful guard of a Chicago Police Department SUV, about 2 score of the military personnel, from the 2nd Battalion 24th Marine regiment, were engaging in a basic boot camp exercise, running a 100 yard course while carrying a fellow Marine on their back.

This was taking place on a field customarily reserved for softball and more recently, soccer games.

In fact, the Marine exercise seemed to have displaced a regular Latino Sunday soccer game, where more than a hundred recent - probably mostly illegal - Latino aliens would gather, without a park permit. They almost always would set up a food tent and dispense cooked items to the assembled throng -- almost certainly without requisite Chicago food handling permits.

We don't know if this Marine exercise was arranged to thwart the apparently ever-growing assemblages of Latinos who have essentially been taking over River Park.

Or if it is, as Alex Jones contends on his InfoWars website -- a further attempt to acclimate American citizens to ongoing military presence in their communities.

Just last week in downstate Illinois, there was an unexplained and thoroughly unexpected major military show of force on a Livingston, Illinois school ground.

We don't know whether to be grateful that the Marine presence has, for one Sunday at least, thwarted the illegal alien takeover of the stately north side park -- or to be concerned over this as another instance of an attempt to inure free Americans to a growing martial government presence.

Or maybe the Marines were just, as the Chicago Park District advertising slogan suggests, "Coming on out to play."

Black Thugs Prey on Chicago Gay Pride Parade-goers: Event May Be Moved Out Of Boystown

You'd never know it if you relied on the mainstream Chicago news media, but the June 29th Chicago Gay Pride Parade was marred for at least the 2nd year, by violent black thugs violently attacking mostly white parade spectators.

Black Thugs Had a Field Day
Robbing and Beating Pride Parade Watchers

Most of the attacks were by-products of robberies.

We know this thanks to the Inside-Booster publications. A lone remnant of the Lerner chain of neighborhood newspapers, they alone chronicled the violent crime attendant to the event. (July 2nd edition, p.1)

Further, they reported that, due to the black-on-white criminality, the openly gay 44th ward alderman, Tom Tunney, said that he may call for the annual event to be moved out of the heavily gay Lakeview neighborhood and relocated to the loop next year.

Here are the Pride parade-related, violent events chronicled by the Inside Booster community newspaper:

--- A woman was robbed of her bookbag and beaten by three black men and two black women at the corner of Addison and Sheffield. Due to the crush of people, police were unable to get to her at the time. They took her statement at 4:51 am at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center. 

Scene From the 2009 Black Pride
Montrose Event - Denied a Permit in '14

--- A man and a woman were struck with bottles and robbed near Broadway and Surf by a group of black men who then fled in a navy blue vehicle. A Chicago Fire Department crew passing at the time of the attack, reported a group of 30 young black men fighting and damaging cars at that corner during the time of the attack.

--- A man was beaten and robbed on the sidewalk at 916 W. Belmont. He was evacuated by ambulance.

--- A man was robbed of his wallet and $100 cash by a black male at 901 W. Belmont

--- A man was beaten and robbed under the Red Line El tracks near Belmont by a black male in his 20s

--- A man was beaten and robbed outside Big & Little's restaurant at 1034 W. Belmont

According to the paper, this was at least the second year in which the Pride festivities were marked by widespread victimization of the largely white attendees by black criminals. In an attempt to avoid this kind of crime, the city this year denied a park permit to organizers of an annual "Black Pride" gathering at nearby Montrose harbor.

But several hundred blacks gathered at Montrose beach rocks for the simultaneous event, despite the lack of a permit. That event was marked by 4 shooting incidents.

Alderman Tom Tunney told WBBM-TV news that he is "evaluating alternative locations for the next year's pride parade. "We hear from our residents that they don't feel safe in their neighborhood...If there is an option to move it downtown, I'm not afraid to look at it," Tunney said.

Real American Poetry By Ellin Anderson: Happy 4th of July 2014

(Editor's note: Nothing could be more appropriate for us to publish this 4th of July holiday, than the work of Ellin Anderson. She is a New England-based poet whose work artistically and eloquently captures the very essence of the America that we know. At a time when the arts are dominated by counter-cultural, usually anti-American, hacks and poseurs, her work is as genuinely refreshing as it is beautiful. We present it here by permission along with an exclusive foreword from the author.)

Foreword by Ellin Anderson

The elegant wineglass elm — “wineglass” referring to its shape — was once a symbol of New England, where I have lived all my life.

In his book, Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (Yale University Press, 2003), Thomas J. Campanella tells us that “…the American elm was something of paramount significance for the people of the United States, and of New England in particular.”

It “was” something of significance, because starting in the 1920s, a beetle-borne disease out of Asia decimated our native elms. New England’s streets, over arched with beautiful colonnades and canopies of elms, and the lone wineglass elm shading cows in a pasture, are no more.

The age of the elm is associated in my mind with civility: a paradox of the period when America still took itself dead seriously.

When our patrician President Teddy Roosevelt (1901–1909) told us to “Speak softly” but “carry a big stick” so as to “go far,” the “big stick” in question was a mighty U.S. Navy, pledged by Roosevelt to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in this hemisphere, and to make us a world power around the globe.

When society was decent and manners were an art, America was brutal, by modern standards, in controlling its southern border. During the aptly named “Border War” (1910–1916), we enlisted General John J. Pershing and the future General George S. Patton to chase Pancho Villa and his posse back to Mexico.

That happened when elms last graced New England in all their glory.

Look at us now.

Look at Mexico. (If you can’t see the Mexican border from your window, just be patient.)

Look at Iraq.

Rudeness and lewdness, transmitted via the mainstream media, are our parasitic beetles. National impotence is a co-morbidity of the diseases they impart.

The little town in Massachusetts where I spent most of my childhood has an “Elm Park” dating to the 19th century.  By the time I was skating there, the elms were long gone, having succumbed to the ghastly bug.

But elms of a new and hardy species were recently planted to replace them. Today I live in northern Vermont, and on the hill where I like to walk, I seem to have found a survivor elm in an old pasture. I have written a poem about it.


THE PLEDGE

By Ellin Anderson

The wineglass elm
Of storied praise
That graced the realm
Of kinder days,

And rose to pledge
An endless toast
At empire’s edge,
Is now a ghost.

But on a day
Before the fall,
I made my way
Past wood and wall,

And from the grass
The pasture wore,
That graceful wineglass
Rose once more.

Vines wrapped the tree
As round a sheaf,
Quite prettily,
With flaming leaf

And pendant from
Its tapered shape,
Hung hue of plum:
The ripened grape.

Could there be mist
In that warm shade?
White vapors kissed
A promenade

Of stateliness
In summer white
Where numberless
As stars at night

Were all the stitches,
Ruffles, pearls,
The handmade riches
Countless girls

Had sewn, by candles,
Patiently,
For rituals
Of courtesy.

As fine as ever,
Nod and bow,
The graces never
Thought of now;

Men tipped straw hats,
And ladies smiled.
White canes, white spats;
Each man, and child

And woman seemed
To walk in bliss;
No dream I’d dreamed
Was quite like this.

What gods held sway
With canes and fans
To rule the day?
Americans

Who lightly stepped,
And softly spoke
Through vigils kept.
More modern folk

Carry a stick
Whose core is rotten;
Weak and sick,
And soon forgotten.

It was late,
The light soon killed.
I could not wait.
The wineglass filled

With sunset’s tranquil
Potency
Against the chill
Come over me.

And home I went
To gather wood
For time well spent
In doing good,

And here’s my thought,
A lesson learned:
The worse the rot,
The sooner burned.

© 2014 by Ellin Anderson. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied or used in any way without written permission from the author.

You can experience more of Ellin Anderson's poetry at her personal sites:

http://www.ellinanderson.com

http://home.earthlink.net/~ellingreeranderson/index.html