Chicago-Two Great Movie Quotes

Well this is perhaps the best fictional quote ever about Chicago courtesy of the film "The Untouchables".

Now comes the new STARZ television series Boss .  I haven't seen this show yet but John Kass  over at the Chicago Tribune writes about it today in an editorial.  Kass pulls out another great fictional Chicago quote that never-the-less hits close to home.  In the scene Kass describes, the fictional mayor tells a young politician with growing asperations and with an Obama cadence about the "city of tribes".  "City of Tribes", if you ever read Kass, is his term for this area  and tells you all about Chicago that you really need to know:

"They want to be led," Mayor Kane says of the people of Chicago. "They want their disputes settled. They want their treaties negotiated, jobs dispensed, their mutinies punished. And they want their loyalties rewarded. And to those who would lead them to all they want, they get power. It's a covenant. Unspoken and elemental. When a part fails, (pause) it needs to be fixed."

Oh maybe we should add a third phrase describing the way things are often done around here.  "Nobody saw nuthin."

Chicago is a big complicated city with lots of moving and diverse parts.  I don't comment on whether all of this is good or bad.  I just say that it is what it is.  And at the end of the day, it is  "The Chicago Way."

Link:  Kass on the series "Boss".