“This is the city: Los Angeles, California. I work here. I carry a badge.” –Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb), Dragnet
These are the bookshelves, in the south suburbs of Chicago. I own them. I read the books.
This long and skinny bookcase is the “command center.” (more…)
In the United States, “socialism” or “socialist” can be a dirty word. Many people would perhaps rather admit to being a parking-ticket scofflaw, or tearing the wings off butterflies.
But not Alan Maass. In his book The Case for Socialism, published in 2004 by Chicago’s very own Haymarket Books (with an afterword by the late Howard Zinn), he proudly admits his political affiliation. And he wants you to join him.
In a slim 127-page volume (it fit easily into a patch pocket of my cargo shorts, with room to spare), Maass, a writer for the weekly Socialist Worker, pursues an ambitious agenda. He argues that capitalism has to go. It must go today.
According to Maass, not only our economy but our whole way of life is rapacious, based on the principle of winner-take-all, with only a few real winners sitting immovably at the top. The result is a kaleidoscope of destructive chain reactions for those of us farther down the food chain: declining wages, abysmal health care, famine, environmental degradation, wars.
When Rocco Facchini was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1956, he was charged to uphold the teachings of the Catholic Church. According to those teachings, ghosts don’t exist.
But then, Facchini hadn’t lived at St. Charles Borromeo, yet.
His first job was associate pastor of St. Charles, a Near Southwest Side parish. There, Facchini watched mysteriously blinking lights and listened to inexplicably shrieking radios. Sonic booms jolted him and a fellow associate out of their beds late one night.
And then there were the guests who wanted to know who that nice old priest was who sat in a back parlor, near the bathroom, smiling cheerily as they went in to do their business, and then disappearing.
It bore the imprint of the Right Reverend Peter James Muldoon, builder of St. Charles, and first bishop of Rockford, Illinois. Life took him far from his old parish, but his death thirty years ago must have brought him back. That was exactly when the weirdness started.
