I was a teenager living in Chicago at the time of the Great Uprisings surrounding the Democratic convention in 1968. The late mayor Richard J. Daley, father of the present day mayor, went from the kingmaker role he played in 1960 to being a turgid, inarticulate, anachronistic old fool during the process. Daley was proud of the cosmetic makeover he had given the city in anticipation of the arrival of the Democrats and the national media.
The convention was held in the old Chicago Stadium, home of the NBA Bulls and NHL Blackhawks, and situated in a heavily blighted neighborhood on Madison Street a few miles west of the Loop. Daley spent a lot of time and money applying cosmetics to the route between the downtown hotels and the Stadium; a lot of painted barriers were erected in front of vacant lots and a lot of trees were planted in the median strips and parkways.
If there was one thing that could get Daley going into one of those malapropism-laden press conference tirades for which he had become justly famous, it was the idea of "people comin' here from udder places" and causing trouble in his city. In the summer of '68 there was no shortage of those foreign agitators in Chicago.
It was during one of those press conferences, following the rioting resulting from the Martin Luther King assassination, that Daley made one of his most famous and fitting misstatements. In reaction to reports of looting, Daley had issued a shoot-to-kill order to his police department, to which the news media in Chicago reacted predictably. When being asked to defend the order, Daley became flustered and said, "Let's get the thing straight, gentlemen. The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder. "
So it was that during a press conference during the convention, Daley launched a screed about those people from udder places who were coming in to Chicago and starting trouble. He talked about his own beautification efforts and asked the pointed question — "These people who come here from udder places and cause trouble — where are their programs? What trees do they plant?"
What does this have to do with David Berlinski?
Berlinksi is a mathematician and Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank with a primary mission of promoting the anti-science concept of Intelligent Design (ID). There was a recent post at ID the Future that continues a long-winded, seemingly interminable interview with Berlinski, with the interviewer being Berlinski himself. It seems as though he's struggling against what must be near-terminal ennui — the rest of the world is such a bother, don't you know — and is irritated that no one else is interested in talking to him, so he's enlisted the only worthy interviewer he knows.
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