In the summer of 2009, at the height of Mayor Daley’s push to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, I had a conversation with an alderman that resonates with me to this day.
“And if you’re wrong?” I asked.
My aldermanic buddy was by no means the only silently skeptical Olympic flag-waver back then. And the perverse thing is, they all knew Daley’s Olympic dreams were folly. They knew they would saddle us with unspeakable debt. And yet, like that alderman, our corporate, civic, and media elite signed on anyway.
I’m pretty sure no one in a position of power around here will ever credit the No Games crowd for turning the tide against the games—you wouldn’t want to encourage other citizens to think they could actually beat City Hall from time to time.
When I called to tell Bodhi I was giving him a gold medal, he said he’d come up with a new term: “distractracy”—in which rulers subdue the ruled by distracting them.
Maybe the cops should file their own FOIA request to see if Daley was spying on them.
