In my family’s history, a few generations back, you’ll find a gene pool connected to the Chicago machine. From what I’ve been told, there were a lot of strange jobs connected to working for that machine, which kept a certain political class in power for decades – until Harold Washington broke the chain for a bit by building a real coalition. Now it’s back to a Daily routine, as we all know.

Anyway, the point I was going to make is that the Chicago machine was, and is, a “liberal” party creation, just like the Bush machine is a “conservative” party creation. I would suggest, though, that all machines operate under similar laws of political physics. To articulate a few: First, they don’t aspire to represent the people, but rather only to accumulate power, so they are inherently anti-democratic. Second, they utilize the “machinery” of democracy to make their anti-democratic power grab appear legitimate.

So, back to my gene pool…. When I was a very little young’un, hearing stories about my family history, I always wondered why my grandfather (who worked as a precinct captain in Chicago under his brother, who was a Ward captain) before every election, would go out and round up the winos and get them down to the polls to vote – often more than once --for machine candidates. Of course, in between elections, everyone who worked for the machine, on that odd-job city payroll, made sure the streets were paved for those who voted the correct way, etc. However, even as a little kid, that just didn’t seem to fit with my idea of democracy. But then, some people might say that is what made Chicago the city that works, right? (Or so it would seem, until you took a drive through Cabrini-Green and vast swaths of the South Side, or those streets of desolation in between the towers of the Gold Coast.

But one thing I never wondered about is why my father walked away from all that the machine offered him as a result of “family” connections, in disgust, and at great personal sacrifice, turning down a full college ride to go pound spikes on the railroad. You see, he did believe in integrity and democracy. And I guess I grew up to pursue similar values, as children often follow in their parent’s footsteps.

I guess my point here is that the whole argument about whether Lopez or Calderon won the election is not the point. I naturally assume Fox used his “machine” to help assure his “family” continued in power, as is the objective of all “machines.” I also suspect Lopez would do the same, should he be annointed to head the Mexican “machine.”

The real question for me is how do you break the machine. And the only way I can think that through to an answer is to look at what my dad did, and multiply that simple act of courage and integrity by millions of people, so that the machine no longer has leverage over any of us.

I remain an idealist in that sense, hoping for the day when democracy is no longer a cruel joke that is used to prop up the power of this machine or the next machine.  

And whether that goal is attainable is really in our hands, not in the vote tally for liberal or conservative machine apologists, whether they be of the ilk of Lopez or Calderon.

Regardless of what you think of Harold Washington as a person, or his agenda and track record overall, I propose that he proved, for a brief moment in Chicago’s history, that the machine could be beaten. And I think his formula for that success — building a coalition, as Washington said, to fight the “good fight with unseasoned weapons and a phalanx of people”  — can work on a global scale with the realization that all politics is local; in fact, it is all about individual choice and courage and integrity. That, in the final analysis, is what I figure will determine Mexico’s fate in the days to come, and our future in the states in the years ahead.

And maybe, one day, we can all celebrate the birth of authentic democracy in the wake of realizing:

“We have destroyed the dinosaur.” — Harold Washington