Like any small boy, I have a keen eye for both guns and boats. So, of course, I noticed the M240 machine gun mounted at the bow of one of the Coast Guard’s Defender patrol boats cruising the Chicago River.
This was back in the elysium of 2012, when it was a simple matter to invite myself aboard for a lake patrol, checking the fire extinguishers on pleasure boats and seeing just how fast the twin 825 horsepower Detroit Diesel engines could go, powering a pair of Rolls Royce Waterjets — basically underwater jet engines — with nothing as dinky as propellers necessary.
The Coast Guard public relations representative at the time was reluctant to tell me the boat’s top speed — 40 knots, according to their own web site — and one fun aspect of the resulting column was digging up details the Coast Guard flack refused to divulge, citing national security, that were nevertheless ballyhooed online. Small wonder why they never invited me back.
Fun is the first casualty of authoritarian regimes — as we were reminded when President Donald Trump, through his puppet FCC chairman Brendan Carr, turned an ephemeral Jimmy Kimmel routine into a permanent, maybe important, chapter in American history.
Not the brightest media strategy. I’m not sure how Trump squares his self-assigned greatness with a furious need to denounce every high school talent show snickering at him. It seems the mark of a deeply insecure individual.
He should be used to it by now. Mocking would-be tyrants is a patriotic duty. Though aspirant strongmen, unwilling to trust the machinery of democracy to keep them in power for as long as they want, aka forever, try to squelch the rising laughter, often by pushing their power into places it doesn’t belong.
There was an unfunny chill to see U.S. Border Patrol boats cruising the Chicago River Thursday — well, I didn’t see them, myself, I was at the Newberry Library studying French maps of Chicago from 1825, researching a column for next month. But the Sun-Times got pictures.
Four boats, packed with armed men, slowly cruising the river.
Armed federal agents ride a boat on the Chicago River in the Loop Thursday.
It has to be funny, too, right? Social media must be awash with memes of brave aquatic centurians patrolling the mean waterways of Kill City, the masses of neon green kayaks and floating tiki bars peddled by celebrants working off their margaritas digitally erased.
What could the Border Patrol possibly be doing here? Not a lot of immigrants without legal status arriving via the Chicago River — though it’s amusing to imagine how that would work.
Submarines hired by the international paleta cartel, surfacing on Lake Michigan, dispatching rubber rafts full of eager undocumented workers, ready to flood the city with coconut popsicles. Barges of medical technicians, having set forth from Tampico a month earlier and worked their way up the Mississippi by night, along the Illinois River, and through the Sanitary and Ship Canal, determined to staff the overnight shift at Rush University Medical Center.
The Coast Guard still has its station at Calumet Harbor, renamed “Coast Guard Station Chicago.” Just a short hop from the essential Calumet Fisheries. Worth visiting just to remind yourself there is indeed an Avenue J — not to forget Avenues L, M, and N — in Chicago.
The Coast Guard’s midwest PR representative in Cleveland began tentatively, “We have a station in Wilmette …” and seemed uncertain about Calumet. “Can you spell that?” she said. So I took the direct approach and called the Calumet Station just in time to hear 8 a.m. bugle reveille. I called back and confirmed they are still there. “We’re still active,” a guardsman said, adding they patrol the Chicago River “occasionally in the summer.”
The Chicago Police Department marine unit routinely patrols 80 square miles of Lake Michigan, 38 miles of the Chicago River and 27 miles of Chicago shoreline [Chicago does not technically have a “coast,” remember, not being on the ocean]. That keeps them busy.
For instance, last Monday just before 7 a.m., a 35-year-old man, apparently distraught, jumped into the river from the 400 block of West Monroe. Another man went in, trying to help him, and a police patrol boat ended up fishing them both out, the police report stated, sending the first man to Northwestern Medical Center for a mental health evaluation.
No indication of the Border Patrol flotilla doing anything positive — one assumes they’d share that if it happened. Just another show of force by an executive branch hot to squash any power than its own.
It won’t work. We are a nation forged by 13 independent colonies that intentionally created a government that would respect the rights of independent states. One man can’t change that.