The Other "L" Word

As a full-service blog, I occasionally like to help acclimate the wayfarer who washes up on my City's fair shores the our local folkways and customs. So in the spirit of that sort of top-notch service provision, today let me offer a little bit of Chicagoese-to-English Rosetta Stonage in order to understanding the single most important word in a local news item

But first, to settle you into the right frame of mind, a bit Sout’ Side poesy from local artist Tony Fitzpatrick's fine book, "Bum Town":

The Dead Still Walk
...

The Irish dead still talk
A lot in this city.
The fog is like cigar smoke
At the foot of the lake,
And Richard J. Daley
Could always see through
The smoke.
Every wink, every nod,
Every smirk
Turned into highways,
Skyscrapers and bridges.
"I'm a kid from the stockyards--
I'll stand with you."
And he did.

Then the Irish
Licked the frosting,
Ate the cake
And sold the
Plate.

Who built the pyramids?
Mayor Daley built the pyramids.
(Everybody knows dat.)

OK, so now that you're good and lubed, see if you can spot the Key Word in this snip from the Sun Times:

FOP president: Mayor Daley lacks loyalty, respect for cops

April 19, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue accused Mayor Daley today of demonstrating a “lack of loyalty and respect” for Chicago Police officers with his “flippant and erratic” response to an arbitrator’s ruling on the new police contract.

“Those advising the mayor on what he should or should not do or say need to step up and tell the Emperor he is truly naked,” Donahue wrote in a Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

“His statements demonstrate his lack of integrity in labor relations, his woeful misunderstanding of the negotiations for this contract, as well as his lack of loyalty and respect for Chicago Police officers. … This mayor has once again driven a wedge between himself and organized labor with his flippant and erratic remarks.”

Chicago taxpayers dodged a fiscal bullet last week when rank-and-file police officers were awarded a ten percent pay hike over five years, their smallest increase in nearly three decades.

The pay raise fell short of the 16.1 percent Daley once offered and even shorter of the 24 percent the FOP initially demanded.

Daley responded to the city’s victory by urging officers bitterly disappointed in their pay raise not to blame him for the 16.1 percent their union leaders left on the table.

“If I agreed to 16 percent, they had my word on 16 percent. But, union officials must have not trusted [it]. I’m their kicking boy. In order to make their members mad at me, they have to kick me around. I understand that. That’s how it works. They make me the bad guy. But, I’m not the bad guy in this situation,” the mayor said Friday.

On Monday, Donahue fired back with verbal guns blazing.

He argued that the mayor’s “incoherent words” demonstrated his “total ignorance” of what actually happened in the negotiations.

Donahue maintained that it was Daley who pulled the offer off the table in March, 2009 “before it had even been discussed,” arguing that taxpayers could no longer afford the increase at a time when the city was hemorrhaging revenue.

The decision so infuriated the rank-and-file, 4,000 officers marched around City Hall chanting, “Daley sucks.”

“To say that the union didn’t let their members know of the offer defies the fact that all city offers were posted on the union website,” Donahue wrote.
...

In Chicago, everybody knows what makes the sun to shine and the grass to grow. What makes our trees blue

and our rivers green.

In Chicago, the magic word is “Loyalty”. It is the only true coin of the realm, and there is almost no way to overstate how much everything else is, in the end, some form of fiat currency based on it. Blind, fierce, dog loyalty, that flows up the stairs and through the door of the man on the Fifth Floor of City Hall.

Loyalty...and everything else is everything else is jabba jabba.

Of course, in some ways, catching City Hall’s fancy is better than winning the lottery, but it comes with a heavy price tag; in exchange for material security you may at any moment find yourself being used as footstool or a prop or a whipping boy or a flotation device. Sure that day may never come, but there it hangs, over your head, every day, and the loyalty that binds people to those arrangements is the enchanted ingredient that gets people onto the few Clout Lists you know about (like this, and this and this), and the many that you don't.

It’s what lands one no-neck ward heeler after another into comfortable, six-figure jobs that they somehow keep, rain or shine.

It’s what makes sure that, if you get caught and take your whippin’ like a man -- protect the Machine and don't say nuthin' -- there'll be a little something waiting for you when you breathe free again.

It’s what permitted "Whispering Vic" Reyes to quietly slip the noose, and ride his City Hall Rolodex into opulent prosperity in the private sector, and Jon "The Torturer" Burge to slither away to live out the rest of his days down in Florida -- fat and happy on his city pension -- instead rotting behind the walls of a federal prison.

Loyalty is what insures that if the particular mud puddle you’re stomping in gets too splashy and you have to leave the Magic Kingdom before you track it into Hizzoner’s office, you'll land someplace soft...while the lack of it insures that, no matter how bright you shine, come hard times, under the bus you'll go-go-go.

And hard times have come at last -- much harder than expected now that there will be no Magic Olympic Gelt to paper over the city’s deepening financial problems -- and Da Mare has run out of fiscal card tricks to play and public assets to sell off. Chicago was not tagged in Forbes “Smack Ten” list of cities in free fall, but it might well have made the Top 20: City Gummint is broke -– massive layoff-broke, furlough-broke, service cutback broke – and considering that it bought a lot of its newer, shinier toys and amenities with what amounts to borrowed money, everyone believes the cutbacks and belt-tightening is only going to get much, much worse.

Which leaves Hizzoner with a problem that Abraham Lincoln once colorfully described as “Too Many Pigs For the Teats”. And the problem with a system based on clout and fealty to power is that it begins to fall apart when there’s not enough to go around anymore.

Thus the outburst in the newspaper from the head of the FOP.

To be sure, Da Mare has been knocking heads with the police and fire unions since the day he took office.

Back in the Late Cretaceous Era.

But whatever the bad feelings, in the end cops have always had a place at Hizzoner’s right hand, usually literally

as well as figuratively.

But the Clout Machine has no “off” switch, and Chicago’s unofficial motto isn’t “Where’s Mine?” for nothing. And so when, Da Mare goes to negotiate with a bunch of cops to whom he has made a lot of promises…

…and he tries to cry poormouth after everyone in the room has read this over their morning coffee:

Suspended Daley aide lands new six-figure gig at police department

Posted by John Byrne at 5:22 p.m.

Ex-city Fleet Commissioner Michael Picardi, suspended by City Hall this year after an embarrassing contracting mistake, has landed a new $129,000-a-year job with the Chicago Police Department.

As a deputy director, Picardi will oversee the police department's general support division, which includes the city auto pound, equipment and supply, and document services and graphics, according to police department spokesman Roderick Drew.

The new gig comes after Mayor Richard Daley suspended Picardi without pay for three months in January for contracts involving Central Auto Body in the Logan Square neighborhood. The shop's owner, John Szybkowski, was convicted nearly 30 years ago of faking work orders on police department vehicles and giving kickbacks to city workers. Yet that didn't stop him from getting a new city contract.
…

This isn't the first time Picardi has switched city jobs amid criticism.
…

It doesn’t feel like just another negotiating tactic.

It feels like having your face rubbed in horse byproduct. Like you’re being playing for chump. Like something as unspoken and vital as a major bone has been broken, way down deep.

In Chicago, there are a hundred ways to throw a hundred insults around and not leave a scar.

Calling a man’s loyalty directly into question on the front page of the paper ain't one of them.