Channeling the Spirit of Studs Terkel
The tape is rolling. It’s 2026, and the air in Chicago is thick with the same old promises, just wrapped in newer, shinier digital foil. We’re talking about faith today folks. Not the kind that moves mountains, but the kind that moves poll numbers.
I’m sitting here thinking about the people I met over the years. Some were bricklayers with hands like weathered leather. I’d hear it often: “Studs, a building is only as good as its foundation. If the bottom is rotten, the gold leaf at the top of the dome doesn’t mean a lick.” I watched the critters in Washington on Sunday.
Take Senator Tim Sheehy. He’s up there in our hallowed halls, clutching his chest because the nation’s capital can’t host a gala without a “threat of violence.” He calls it an “embarrassment” that we don’t have a proper ballroom for the Dear Leader. Now, you can walk down just about any street in this city and you’ll see an embarrassment, if you listen and look. You’ll see a man who served in the Marines, sitting on a milk crate with his life in a plastic bag. You might see someone’s mother choosing between the light bill and the prayer she’s whispering over her sick child. But for our great Senator, the tragedy isn’t the broken body of a veteran or the hunger of a neighbor, it’s the lack of a chandelier-lit room where the powerful can clink glasses in peace.
Then there’s John Fetterman, the man who traded the picket line for the party line, or maybe just a different set of hoodies. Nobody’s quite sure which party he’s attending, but he is talking about “TDS”, Trump Derangement Syndrome, for the few who haven’t yet heard that particular piece of name-calling, as if questioning the morality of a movement is itself a kind of vanity. This great senator wants us to “drop the TDS” and just build that White House ballroom.
It’s a new brand of name-calling, folks. A digital stamp for “shut up and follow.” It’s the same “snowflake” talk from the “but her emails” days, just polished up for the next election cycle.
The irony is as thick as the smog over the Dan Ryan. These folks proclaim a “Christian” identity as if it’s a membership at Mar-a-Lago. They use the mythology of the Carpenter from Nazareth, to justify a culture of greed and exclusion. They’ve turned “Love thy neighbor” into “Check thy neighbor’s voter registration.” They’ve swapped the Beatitudes for a spreadsheet of corporate tax cuts.
It’s a cultural identity, a jacket they put on to signal they’re part of the “right” tribe, while the actual teachings, the ones about mercy and the “least of these,” get left out in the cold like an unwanted guest.
The worker in the cubicle and the guy on the assembly line, they know when they’re being sold a bill of goods. Christianity, in its essence, is supposed to be a radical empathy. What we’re seeing now is a radical selfishness, dressed in Sunday best and demanding a ballroom while the world outside is shivering.