Month: March 2010

Inspired by experience

Sun-Times corrected this boo-boo, which can be found here, at a Google search page and was not wrong in hard copy: “It was Devine design.”

Yes, there was a state’s attorney named Devine, but no, it was not his design for Otis McDonald to become lead complainant in the case v. Chi’s gun ordinance in the U.S. Supreme Court.  McD had divinity in mind, not the immediate past state’s attorney.

He and the ordinance and why he’s fighting it with help of “gun lobby” people is told in a quite good piece today by Mark Konkol, one of S-T’s hard-at-work conveyors of hard reporting.

McD has had enough and isn’t taking it any more, that’s why.  He’s a 21st-century urban hero who looks back on his sharecropper mother in Louisiana who cashed in her piggy bank, all $18, to buy him a ride to Chi in 1951, when  he was 17, so he could find, that is make, for himself a better life.

He became a janitor at U. of Chi, making “waves on campus” by applying for a promotion to building engineer when no blacks were applying because it just wasn’t done.  Now in his S. Side, Morgan Park neighborhood home, where he lives with his wife and daughter and has grandchildren as visitors, he is standing up to be counted as one who would be armed.

As a kid in Louisiana — seven years old — he went into the woods and bagged all manner of wild creatures who could be eaten and skinned.

Out there by myself. I’d get me some rabbits, squirrels, ‘coons, opossums,

he told Konkol.

When a kid tried to break into his garage, he levelled his long gun at him and counselled him henceforward to stay away, which the kid did.

But when three guys blocked his car on his way to the Jewel, “cussing … saying, ‘I’ll put you down, you old gray-haired mothers-and-such; I’ll put you down,” because he’d done the good-citizen thing as Mayor Daley recommends, calling cops on gun-toters earlier, he had no way to defend himself.  He wants that to change, so it’s McDonald vs. the city (and my own Oak Park, piggy-backing on Chi) at the high court.

The mayor?  He wishes he could get him to “feel and see what” he sees.

”Maybe he could come here and spend the night, especially during the summer, and listen to what I listen to out my window. If he could, and he was open to that, he would see what’s really going on in his city … and maybe he would understand where I’m coming from.”

Something like that would win some votes too.  Daley should take note.

Let no person call it father

The longtime resident priest at our parish has his own way of saying the mass, subbing out references to God the Father, for instance, as in this “doxology” or invocation of the Trinity:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.

To which the people say “Amen.” This is the “Great Amen” meant to affirm our trinitarianism.

The resident, however, says it this way, and the pastor today said it this way too, apparently brought around by the example of the older man:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty God, for ever and ever.

This version sidesteps the fatherhood of God in favor of the politically correct non-reference to gender.  Irksome and annoying, to say the least.

Read it and weep

Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel, by Jerry Oppenheimer, is scored by reviewer Eric J. Iannelli, in the 9/4/09 Times [of London] Literary Supplement for its triteness.  (On-line only for subscribers)

“As befits such a seedy, tabloid-style expose, the writing is cliched and hyperbolic,” writes Iannelli, giving some juicy particulars:

Investigators are “hard-nosed”.  It is the “tired,poor, huddled masses” who immigrate through Ellis Island.  Japan is “the Land of the Rising Sun,” Germany is “the Fatherland” and Hollywood is “La-La Land.”

Etc.  A main character in this non-fic account “always got what she wanted” and “never took no for an answer.”  Her rise is twice described as “meteoric,” she “goes ballistic.”  And especially good are the verbs used instead of “say” or “said”:  “Very few . . . say anything. . .  they observe, maintain, intone or opine.”

Ianelli still found the book “engaging,” even if “sensationalist” and “one-sided,” because it raises “legitimate concerns” such as “lavish executive bonuses . . . in the face of scandal and falling profits.”

And nobody kept inserting “you know” in the middle of sentences or between them.  If you heard them talking live, ah, that would be a different matter, I’m sure.