The People's Cube Over Chicago

In this installment, the Cube goes to Chicago - the holy land of Barack Obama, Saul Alinsky, Luis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and many others who snatched this glorious city from the jaws of capitalism.

LEFT: Cube poses for pictures on top of the Sears Tower. This was meant to complete the takeover of Chicago. However, some things got out of control...

But let us start from the very beginning...

We couldn't get a good angle of the Corncob Towers (Marina City),
so we liberated this picture from the Internet. All the other pictures are made by us.

Chicago turned out to be a surprisingly clean, comfortable, well-planned, and friendly city.

When the Cube and I were still in the Soviet public school system, we liked to imagine magnificent cities built by happy workers in the bright communist future, where we were destined to live. It didn't happen that way. The real trick was supposed to be to wait for the capitalists to build magnificent cities and then to take them over.

In terms of its architecture, Chicago is everything Manhattan could've been if it hadn't been taken over by the progressives so soon and so vigorously.

Imagine the best parts of New York extracted, steam-cleaned, renovated, and put together in a better, human-friendly fashion by a thoughtful and inspired designer - and you will get Chicago.

The progressives did well to hijack such a jewel of capitalist prosperity. There's still enough wealth in it to last for a few more years and maybe even decades.

The Cube took an architectural tour on a boat along the Chicago River, with a young guide who kept making very progressive, bitter remarks designed to douse our excitement over the architectural magnificence and to stir the righteous anger of vacationing tourists at the unfairness of the capitalist system and the city's brutal history.

With a derisive smirk, as if admitting a shameful fact, he explained the abundance of stunning, originally designed residential buildings in the downtown area by the need to keep the middle class within city limits because they constitute the city's tax base.

In other words, these midle-class bourgeois scoundrels aren't good for anything except their taxes! It is unfortunate that the city must put up with them and their arrogant condos instead of lining the waterfront with cheap and ugly subsidized housing the way New York City did for many years.

Apparently, the Chicago government knows the secret of milking the bourgeoisie to the mutual satisfaction of the both parties.

Chicago as seen from the Signature Lounge on the 96th floor of
John Hancock Center.

The furthest dark-toned skyscraper with two antennae is the Sears Tower. The white skyscraper to the left, made of polished stainless steel and iridescent-tinted glass, is the Trump Tower condo-hotel.

"This is Trump's answer to our growing need in affordable housing," our young tour guide remarked snidely.

That is why we must think globally, comrades. If everything on our planet is limited, so is the amount of living space. Therefore, the more luxury living space is built for the rich, the less space is left for the poor.

Imagine a homeless community who received a government quota of polished stainless steel and iridescent-tinted glass to build an affordable skyscraper for themselves to live in. And one morning, as they came to the site with their state-issued shovels, they discovered that all of it had been stolen at night by Donald Trump for his shamelessly opulent capitalist tower. So naturally, they got frustrated, traded their beloved shovels for drugs and alcohol, and went back to being homeless. Oh the indignity!

Our young guide must have been the product of the local educational system "reformed" by Bill Ayers with the help of Barack Obama, using the funds of the Republican Annenberg Foundation.

(The Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was a Chicago public school reform project from 1995 to 2001 that was funded by a $49.2 million, 2-to-1 matching challenge grant from the Annenberg Foundation. It was started by Bill Ayers and run by Barack Obama as founding chairman and president.)

Chicago is where the idea of skyscrapers was born. Even its churches tend to look like skyscrapers.

We must admit that some parts outside of the downtown area looked more like New York. At one point at night a car approached us and a young an hip driver, who looked like a brother of our tour guide, asked, "Do you guys smoke that weed?" But as we trained our camera on him, he sped away.

On the street level one can find art - as, for example, this ambiguous urban tree hugger.

We occasionally wonder, why don't people who dislike urban life and technological civilization move into the wilderness, armed with a stone axe? On the other hand, the environment is probably better off when these people live as far away from it as possible and only vent their frustrations by making statues such as this.

Have you ever wondered what the proverbial liberal bubble looks like?

In Chicago, we discovered the liberal bubble right in the middle of the downtown area. It is pretty, shiny, and its reflective surface believably distorts the reality in a way that positions you right at the center of the universe, with all other people turning into concave shapes and forming concentric circles around you.

After gazing at it for a while, to turn away and face the reality isn't easy. The real world appears disappointingly straight and square. That is probably why so many passers-by freeze around it, as if trying to make a lasting imprint of the reflection that they can carry away.

"Cloud Gate" sculpture in Millenium Park.

The inside of the liberal bubble is even more amazing. The same person is reflected in it many times over, creating the illusion of majority. It also typifies liberal voting patterns.

Any random number of people get reflected as diverse opposing groups, one unlike the other, struggling for illusory prominence on the magic reflective surface.

As the normal perspective changes, people who in real life are of the same size, become different in magnitude. The resulting image is that of few giants surrounded by swarms of insignificant "little people" in a phantasmagoric pattern representative of the social hierarchy produced by the liberal mindset.

And we don't mean "liberal" in the classical sense.

A few blocks away from the Chicago Liberal Bubble, a major city street was barricaded from all traffic for the "Taste of Chicago" festival.

Crowds of festive people, thousands strong, were roaming amidst kiosks, inhaling barbecue smoke, and forming long lines at food stands. The latter was the only similarity with the Great Depression, to which Chicago's favorite son and current US President continually compares the country's economic situation.

The progressive mood was soon spoiled by the unwelcome presence of an unsmiling, conservative-looking, redneck couple armed with a pitchfork and apparently looking for culprits who are destroying the country and the way of life they had started.

The two oversized right-wing extremists were surrounded by a constantly rotating group of DHS agents disguised as tourists.

The couple just stood there flabbergasted, apparently waiting for a new Tea Party they could join to protest taxation without representation, intrusive government, disappearance of their liberties, and the conversion of America into an imitation of Europe from which they once fled, having consciously chosen a life of risk and hard work for the sake of freedom and independence.

Once these new revolutionaties noticed the People's Cube, we approached and introduce ourselves.

They weren't familiar with the Cube but they seemed to like the idea and said they would check out the website. We, in turn, promised to post their pictures on its pages.

So here we go.

But that was not all! As the evening fell, a group of local Iranian immigrants disrespected Chicago's local son Barack Obama by staging a vigil in support of the anti-government rallies in Iran and of the victims of the Islamic Republic.

If they respected Obama and his policies, they would be condemning the Iranian protesters, blaming the victims, denouncing freedom, wishing the destruction of Israel in a nuclear holocaust, and calling for death to America - just like the current Iranian dictator Mohmoud Ahmadinejad does, with whom Obama wants to negotiate as an equal.

And worst of all, they didn't even have a designated ACORN-approved community organizer (aka Commisar of Ethnic Blankets).