Hello everyone On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 2:11 PM, ADRIE KINTZIGER <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey , Dan. > After your mentioning of criminality in the Chicago area,i'v downloaded > 'The untouchables' with Sean Connery and Kevin Costner, and thereafter a > documentry > about Detroit, apparently the old Ford building are still there...decaying. > Nice, i understand the setting in Chicago better now.
Hi Adrie Yes The Untouchables is good. Another good movie filmed here is The Road to Perdition with Tom Hanks. These and other movies like them attempt to depict the savage history of Chicago-land politics. They tend to romanticize the times though, in my opinion. Things were much more savage than depicted in movies. In LILA, Robert Pirsig talks about how intellectual patterns of value came to the forefront in the early 20th century and attempted to control biological excesses by passing laws, such as Prohibition. This (in retrospect) only exasperbated the problems, leading to more crime, not less. "What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naIve. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction. "It isn't consistent with scientific fact. Studies of bones left by the cavemen indicate that cannibalism, not cooperation, was a pre-society norm. Primitive tribes such as the American Indians have no record of sweetness and cooperation with other tribes. They ambushed them, tortured them, dashed their children's brains out on rocks. If man is basically good, then maybe it is man's basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place." [LILA] What the early 20th century liberals failed to take into account was that intellectual laws would not control crime... social patterns like handcuffs and bullets were required for that. In the end, Prohibition was repealed but the damage was done. Politically, Chicago is still recovering from the graft and corruption introduced by the rise in crime and subsequent infiltration of criminal elements into the mainstream. Even state-wide the effects are being felt as we have one former governor in prison and another facing prison time. On a different note, most manufacturing in the state of Illinois has ceased to exist. The town where I live is a prime example... there are many old buildings standing empty and slowly falling into neglect... benign neglect is the word to use. Weeds, small shrubbery, and even trees sprout through dilipidated roofs and out of broken windows. Inside, old rusty machinery still awaits workers that will never return. I've never been to Detroit but I suspect it is much the same. Part of this problem arose on account of the corporate tax rates driving business out of the state... the taxes being necessary to pay for entitlements voted in by corrupt politicians and well-meaning intellectually-based liberalism. But the bigger picture (I think) points towards the natural evolutionary forces at work in a globally-based economy. Thank you for your thoughts, Dan Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
