Jonah wasn’t lying when he said he was sweating like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News.”
Jonah Goldberg visited Chicago last week to talk about his new book, Tyranny of Cliches, at a Heartland-hosted event at Jaks Tap. Go here to watch the video of Jonah’s talk. Meanwhile, Jonah wrote a few graphs about his visit in his latest Goldberg File.
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Writes Jonah about his visit to Chicago:
Before we get to what very few people call the “substance” of this “news” letter, a quick travelogue. This week’s tale of adventure: Chicago. The windy city, hog butcher to the world.
Love that town. I spoke at a bar event organized by the Heartland Institute and America’s Future Foundation. They had whiskey waiting for me. Good times.
The one hitch: On advice of a plurality of Chicago-savvy Twitter followers I took a cab straight to a place called Portillo’s with the intention of buying a Chicago-style hot dog. But by the time I committed to going to Portillo’s, they explained to me that I would be defying my thymos, my destiny, all that is holy, the old gods and the new, man code, Zagats, the Shanshu Prophecy, the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, the Taxi Customer Bill of Rights, and the Seven Habits of Not Necessarily Effective People if I didn’t get the Italian beef sandwich instead. “Big.”
With cheddar.
And hot peppers.
Oh yes, hot peppers.
So that’s what I did. I was so excited waiting for it, I half expected Morgan Freeman to narrate the moment like I was seconds away from my friend Andy Dufresne at the end of the Shawshank Redemption. The spirit of “I hope” filled me, though not as thoroughly as the awesomely awesome Italian beef sandwich. And while I’ve become convinced that I should have gotten the Italian sausage combo, it was fanfrickingtastic.
Anyway, after walking for an hour in the hot sun and then smoking a cigar, my perspiration level lay somewhere around Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, George Kennedy in Cool Hand Luke, or the perimeter of a full Big Gulp sitting on the hood of your car in New Orleans. I have no doubt that if there were a race of giants who considered the musky manbrosia of Italian beef mingled with cigar and Irish whisky to be the scent of the gods, I would be dangling from the rearview mirror of an enormous Bentley right now.
Perhaps even worse, however, was that I got stood up by Iowahawk who had promised on Twitter that he would attend my talk. I was much chagrined by his absence. I was even more dismayed to learn that the cornhusking jingoist doesn’t even live in Iowa. He lives in Chicago! As I explained to the audience, this is a scandal of enormous proportions. I haven’t been this dismayed since I learned that Elizabeth Warren isn’t an Indian and that the Cherokee don’t eat crab. (I think it’d be awesome if they made like a Quest for Fire-type movie where the Cherokee of the 15th century made the roughly 700 mile trek to the ocean to find some crab and proactively verify Elizabeth Warren’s cherished Indian recipes.)
And that’s just a taste. Sign up for the G-File, sent every week by National Review Online, here.
