A Resounding Rejection of America’s Arrogance :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Rick Telander

A resounding rejection of America’s arrogance :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Rick Telander

WE’RE N0. 4! As I stood with the shell-shocked citizens in Daley Center Plaza before noon Friday, the sickly orange fountain bubbling like toxic waste before us on this gray, miserable day, I halfway expected that cheer to break out.

The first round of the Olympic 2016 vote came in, and Chicago was out?

We can’t beat Tokyo for No. 3?

We can’t beat Madrid?

We are annihilated by Rio de Janeiro, an outdoor discotheque with 6 million samba dancers attached?

This rejection was the world’s memo to Mayor Daley — hmm, whose family is this plaza named after? — that his stuff don’t work outside Cook County. Certainly not outside the corn-lined borders of Illinois.

But it was more than that.

It was a memo to Queen Oprah, to King Obama, to Prince Michael Jordan (who wasn’t in Denmark because he’s never anywhere), to Arch-Duke (Insurance-For-All!) Ryan and, above all, to Hizzlordship/Hizzoner Daley, who has a sneering arrogance that offends anyone who isn’t a career Machine boot-licker (read: aldermen, construction company execs, various lawyers, judges, movers-and-shakers, political bagmen and genetic sycophants).

And the memo said: We don’t care.

And the P.S. said: And we don’t like you, either!

It may be that the United States Olympic Committee, with all of its television and rights demands, had ticked off the International Olympic Committee sufficiently that Chicago never had a chance. Maybe no place in America did.

Nearly half of the IOC is from Europe, and those members might have been committed to Madrid from Day 1. Yet that wasn’t what we were hearing in Chicago these last few months.

Other issues certainly intruded, not the least of which is understandable sentiment for a continent — South America — that has never hosted a Summer or Winter Games.

But Rio didn’t just win, remember. It blew us up.

The video of Fenger High student Derrion Albert being savagely beaten to death the other day went viral on the Internet, and — guess what, folks — they have computers in Europe! Why, they even speak English! They bathe! They travel! They get it!

And they know about us and our Chi-Town fiefdom.

People at the rally were mumbling about how Rio has so much more crime than we do.

And my thought was, wow, that’s a defense? A former Third World country might be more violent than us? Haven’t we risen up, Chicago?

I’ll bet Rio has more cockroaches than us. Lizards, too.

But we have more pigs.

The Daley regime works like this: Hizzoner makes decrees, aldermen pretend to analyze the merits of said decrees, aldermen vote for decrees. Vote no, you don’t get re-elected.

The clout machine works in Chicago, but it works inefficiently, like a busted thresher. It leaks, and it hurts people nearby. On its engine is the city’s motto: “Get to the trough.”

A rich man like 2016 chairman Pat Ryan may have had great visions, but he, too, is brought down by the people — person — in charge. And if Ryan weren’t so interested in his own legacy, do you think, for instance, he would have insisted on changing Northwestern’s revamped Dyche Stadium — which was to have been called Dyche Stadium in perpetuity — to Ryan Field?

It’s more than Chicago, even.

It’s our country.

The United States has had Olympics in the recent past — Atlanta in 1996, Salt Lake City in 2002.

But something has changed since 9/11. (Those 2002 Winter Games were awarded well before that seminal moment in 2001, remember.)

We have become the Ugly Americans again. We blow things up; we eat oil. Like explorers offering blankets to Indians, we hand out toxic things called derivatives and nearly bring down the global economy.

Obama told the United Nations the other day the United States can’t solve the world’s problems by itself anymore.

And what, exactly, was the last problem we solved?

I stood in line for a spell at Daley Center Plaza, waiting to get an orange and white “I BACKED THE BID” T-shirt. For posterity. For memories.

I looked around.

Forget it.

Shared via AddThis