Chicago Daily Observer

Jay Mariotti, the Sun-Times sport oracle, had left a message on my voice mail, and, ooh, was he mad.

It was, maybe, a dozen years ago when I was an editorial board member and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times. As a White Sox fan, I had written something (I presume it must have been nice) about the team and its owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Mariotti disagreed. Furiously.

Don’t you know, Mariotti raged, that “they” are talking about “it.” By “it,” it turned out that Mariotti had written a contrary column on the same subject (I hadn’t seen or heard about it before I wrote mine) and “they” were, presumably, his sports writing colleagues who were having a chuckle that someone from the same paper would disagree with His Majesty.

Most of the rest of the irate message is lost in the fog of my memory, except for this ending: “The next ... Read More...

The coming clash between Barack Obama and John McCain is, the pundits tell us, a struggle between two Americas: liberal and conservative; black and white; young and old. But it is also a confrontation between two very different cities – Obama’s Chicago and McCain’s Phoenix – and their richly opposing political traditions.

As Upton Sinclair so brutally, brilliantly chronicled in The Jungle, Chicago, Illinois – nicknamed the “Windy City” just as much for its politics as the icy blasts tearing off Lake Michigan – has long been a crucible for US socialism. Together with Philadelphia and Baltimore, it was the premier city of organised labour and radical activism in the late 19th century