I have a souvenir of the Bulls championship. It’s a copy of the Revolutionary Worker newspaper, the voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party. On the cover is a picture of Chiang Ching, the recently deceased widow of Mao Tse-tung.
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The flyer said a lot of things. It was on both sides of a page, single-spaced. But basically it said that the looting, rock throwing, and other raucous revelry on the west side was really a “poor people’s press conference,” a spontaneous eruption of revolutionary fervor against capitalist oppression. “The powers even use the game of basketball to promote their own interests,” it said. “They hold up awesome stars like Michael Jordan as ‘proof’ of the tired old lie that with hard work and determination anyone can make it out of the ghetto.
The guy in the Mao shirt conferred briefly with a skinny white guy with a stubbly beard and a red bandanna wrapped around his head. Then he headed up Jackson while the guy with the bandanna took over the corner.
“Why couldn’t the celebration be held on the west side?”
The guy with the bandanna held out a flyer to a black woman who shook her head and kept walking. Another woman folded hers into a neat square and put it in her purse.
“Actually…” he said, and that’s when he pulled out the newspaper with Chiang Ching on the cover. “Do you know who she is?”
So I gave him a buck. I thought, what the hell, maybe I could push my way up to the band shell and get Michael Jordan to autograph Chiang Ching.
