With Monday night’s historic Stanley Cup win for the Chicago Blackhawks, many Chicagoans are celebrating. A huge parade is slated for downtown tomorrow, just outside our offices. Civic pride will no doubt be overflowing.
Yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times had an article by Rick Telander, a great sports reporter, titled “Chicago entitled to gloat with most major-sports championships since 1990.” Telander noted that Chicago teams have won more major sports championships since 1990 than any other city. Lifting our spirits, he wrote “Hey, sports fans, want to call Chicago the City of Champions? Go ahead. And march forward with truth, justice and integrity on your side.”
Thanks, Rick, but maybe we need more fans of city government finances, and reasons to hope that truth, justice and integrity will blossom in that area in the future.
Back in the Roman Empire, before it fell, anyway, leaders of the fundamentally corrupt government kept the masses satiated with “bread and circuses.”
The Wikipedia entry for “Bread and circuses” begins:
"Bread and circuses" (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is metonymic for a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the generation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace, as an offered "palliative." Its originator, Juvenal, used the phrase to decry the selfishness of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase also implies the erosion or ignorance of civic duty amongst the concerns of the commoner.
I’m a big Chicago sports fan, but this is a disconcerting reminder.