Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© August 18, 2013

I have something to say about the new movie, “The Butler”.  I wonder sometimes why I write anything here, to a seemingly growing group of people I don’t really know and also the disturbingly fundamental fact that I’m not paid for it.

But the movie struck me so strongly and my impression was so different than the somewhat snotty and disdainful recent NPR review that I felt I wanted to cancel them out, in my own obscure microscopic voice.  What’s the point of Freedom of Speech if a person has something contradictory and worthwhile to say, but doesn’t bother because there’s no personal reward in it?

(Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman © June 29, 2013

 

Since the June 15th 2013 Chicago Tribune publicity about my Skokie, Illinois back-issue magazine store, people have been coming in from all sorts of places to check me out, but not usually from Shanghai.

 This man, his tall model-like daughter and his wife came in–I have no idea how he could know about what I do–and he asked me for whatever I had from 1874, because his company in China owns another company in Milwaukee which was founded on that date. I found five things for him. In five minutes.

 His daughter, about 18, said, “How did you do that without a computer?”

I responded, “I don’t know any other way to do it.”

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© April 18, 2013

I used to write on another blog about Hyde Park, a southern part of Chicago six or so miles from the Downtown area, a diverse intellectual community containing many things but most famously the University of Chicago, its experimental K through 12 school, the Laboratory School and the Museum of Science and Technology.

Sometimes I responded to what another person wrote and sometimes that response was reprinted here, because it expressed reflections that might mean something to a larger group of whomever my readers are. How can I know you? Facebook is, illogically, faceless. So, Strangers, see if what I wrote matters to you, possibly in some other context.

There was a significant political person named Marshall Korshak, forgotten today, who was a Chicago Democratic Party powerbroker there in the ’50’s,’60’s and ’70’s. Not everyone loved him. I responded to that expressed feeling in his defense. Marshall, born in 1911, died at 85, in 1996. This is what I wrote about him:

I was reading this thread until I read the part about Marshall Korshak and some not so complimentary remarks about him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Me, too. But my relationship with him couldn’t have been more unbalanced.

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

By Robert M. Katzman © February 1, 2013

 

At Dead Man’s Curve

My hot rod swerved

All eighteen wheels sliding

But I twern’t afear’d

That rod was carved from a Model T

Kissed by Henry Ford

An’ afore that, a covered wagon

Racing west through the plains

Flaming arrows piercing the air

My pretty blonde grandma

Screaming and pumpin’ her Winchester

Because damn country people can!

We can hunt bear with an ax

An’ eagles with spears

An’ fish with a machine gun

Damn trout’ll never know what hit ‘em!

  (Read on …)

My name is Robert M. Katzman and I am a Chicago writer. Like everyone, I too was horrified by Friday’s school killings and that gave birth to a possible solution to the terror.  Not idealistic, but with practical multiple benefits.  Nothing means more to me than protecting our children from terror.  This is it:

Create a domestic service to protect every elementary, middle and high school. Call it the National School Guardian Force, NSGF, or whatever name people agree on.  That’s not important.  Hire only unemployed, honorably discharged, physically-fit veterans between 20-40 years old to cover two different entrances to all schools. Pay them a decent wage or salary. This will solve several problems all at once.

It will add a very good primary layer of protection to all schools. It will remove a very large number of vets from unemployment. They are already covered by veteran’s benefits medically and educationally. They already know how to handle weapons and hand-to-hand combat, or many of them will. But they aren’t paying any taxes if they are out of work.

(Read on …)

© March 7, 2012

 The World talks and a Syrian Dies.

Israel, it could be you.  It has been you, at another time and another place.

Have you forgotten the despair, the injustice, the indifference, and the outrageousness of others turning away?

Who are you, as a nation, as a people, to allow this to happen to anyone else?

Israel, and yes, Jews: Take a stand.

Help the Syrians. 

Stop the killing of innocents.

But who am I?

Why give a damn what I think?

I’m not a diplomat.

Not a politician.

Not influential or wealthy.

Just a guy.

But also, long ago, a street fighter and always a Jew.

A person who has been outnumbered, overwhelmed and beaten badly while others stood by.

A person who fought back against crazy odds and won.

But also, a person whose life was saved from a mob by a man with a gun.  A cop.

Not a friend, but someone who was one against thirty in 1982 in Hyde Park.

He didn’t deliberate the risk while I was mauled or killed.  He acted.

He took a chance, took my side and I’m still here, and grateful.

Somehow, today, I feel like a Syrian.

And God help me, I hate a stacked deck.

(Read on …)