Someone’s got to take the blame, and God forbid the mayor shoulder any of it.
We had a beautiful weekend here in Chicago over the Fourth of July holiday season, which — as all Chicagoans could have predicted — means that sadly we had a terrible one as well: 109 people were shot in the city alone, with 19 of them dying.
Those might sound like head-spinning numbers to you — they should — but it’s merely a notably bad patch in the yearly summer orgy of gun crime that has historically been Chicago’s pattern. When the weather is nice, bad things happen because people are out of school and out on the streets. (When it’s hot, even worse things happen.)
If you were a political philosopher, you might blame the decaying social fabric of lower-income communities for this ritual pattern of violence. If you’re a more pragmatic, law-and-order type, you might blame a failure to invest in the police and advanced crime-prevention techniques. And if you’re an average citizen living in one of these neighborhoods, or a member of one of the affected families, you might even be so hopelessly, myopically un-woke as to blame the person who actually pulled the trigger.
Brandon Johnson — who is none of those things but is unfortunately our mayor — blames Richard Nixon instead. Yes, ol’ Tricky Dick truly seems to have left a hunched shadow looming over American history, nearly half a century now since his departure from political office. Here I was, thinking the worst thing Richard Nixon ever did was phoning in football plays to George Allen when the Redskins were in the playoffs, when it turns out Nixon also pretty much devastated the city of Chicago like Godzilla rampaging though Tokyo — and all these years, I never knew.
Well, Johnson didn’t quite put it that way; he was of course more cryptic: “Black death has been unfortunately accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon. I’m gonna work hard every day to transform this city; that’s what we need.”
You should listen to him almost blubber in sadness as he blames — and I am being as charitable as I possibly can here in guessing what Johnson could possibly have meant — Nixon for ending the Great Society and thus ruining the lives of young black men and women in the city of Chicago. Now, I’m pretty sure that Richard Nixon didn’t actually end the Great Society — Medicare and Medicaid are still with us — but more to the point, I am skeptical that insufficient access to low-cost health care is the root cause of gun crime on the West and South Sides of Chicago in 2024.
Brandon Johnson isn’t, however — because someone’s got to take the blame, and God forbid the mayor shoulder any of it. So it’s Nixon’s fault, fine, fair enough — the man’s got enough sins on his soul for one lifetime; what’s adding the downfall of Chicago going to do at this point? What of solutions, however? Well, once Johnson was done sniffily musing about how his mayoralty had been retroactively sabotaged by Nixon from the grave he then announced that he had no ideas how to solve the gun violence. (He’ll “work hard every day,” I guess.) We’re on our own. Literally!
I am urging all of you across the entire city to step up and say, “We’ve had enough.” And I’m hopeful that our ongoing discussions will ensure that our state partners, as well as our federal partners, will swiftly come into the support of the city of Chicago. The city cannot afford to wait any longer.
Yes, we’re in trouble, so — citizens, it’s time to step up and police those streets. And hey Springfield and Uncle Sam! Give us money, gobs and gobs of money. Money solves everything, doesn’t it? (Why, just look at how much Chicago spends per student on public schools! The results speak for themselves!) Maybe Johnson will start a “task force” and open a few new community centers; that’ll stop the gang violence right quick. (Cops? Who needs cops? Brandon Johnson regularly talks in public about the Chicago Police Department like N.W.A.’s most famous song is playing constantly on repeat inside his head. There will be no investment in policing.)
There is an incredible irony, of course, in Brandon Johnson laying the blame for his own civic failures at the feet of Richard Nixon, of all people. Since Brandon Johnson walks through life as if he were born into it ten minutes ago, he might not even have been aware of it when he complained on camera, but I know you are: Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 — an unpopular man narrowly edging out a replacement candidate because enough voters had simply concluded the Democratic Party was a mess and wanted done with it. One major reason they concluded that was because of a Democratic Convention that went, erm, a bit awry. Guess who’s coming to the convention in August, Brandon? It’s Nixon’s ghost.