2013-05-01 – So the Cubs want to leave Chicago if they don’t get their demands met. Bye! Baseball teams are fungible. If the Cubs go, after a few years they will be replaced by the Chicago Hog Butchers and we’ll all go out to the ball game and eat a Best Kosher hot dog and have a beer and life will go on.

And the Hog Butchers might actually win a few seasons.

The amazing thing about all of this hoo-hah is that these perennial losers feel entitled to fire the City of Chicago (or at least threaten). It’s the City of Chicago who ought to be firing the Cubs!

You’d think they have tenure.

But I guess that’s the nature of privilege in America. When they talk about entitlement reform they only talk about Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. They never talk about the banks or insurance companies.

Or the Cubs.

How long do you think you would hold onto your job if you never achieved the goal you were hired for? 105 years? Don’t bet on it. We can’t even talk about the good old days because there’s no one alive to remember them. So let them go. It is about time.

But don’t worry, you could still go out to the Friendly Confines on an afternoon. No reason to close the park. You could have just as much fun having a beer and watching the grass grow.

I’m waiting for ticket sales to open so I can go watch the Chicago Hog Butchers play.

Hog Butcher for the World [Series],
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders . . .

. . . here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities . . .

. . . Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

– “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg originally appeared in the March 1914 issue of Poetry magazine, only four years after the last Cubs World Series win and two years before Wrigley Field, when Chicago was the city of the big shoulders, not the city of the big shrug.