Chicago's 40th Ward deserves a leader, not an attention-seeking rat
Chicago used to be a city of big shoulders. Today, it’s just a city of big problems: A billion-dollar deficit, crime that scares off tourists and taxpayers, a mayor whose main skill is finding new ways to blame Donald Trump, and one of the biggest problems of all: Against this backdrop, the 40th Ward has its own particular burden, so-called Alderman Andre Vasquez.
Vasquez, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist and former battle rapper, has turned his aldermanic office into a stage set where the props are dead rats, the soundtrack is protest chants, and the plot never strays far from his personal need to stay on camera. If the 40th Ward needed an activist-in-chief, Vasquez would be perfect. What it actually needs is an alderman.
The rat, the myth, the legend
Let’s start with the obvious: The rat.
A week ago Sunday, Chicago Police approached Vasquez’s office at 5620 North Western Avenue. There, in a display that looked like a bad street-theater performance, perplexed (and perhaps skeptical) officers found a dead rat and a note calling immigrants “vermin” and urging support for ICE. Ugly? Absolutely. But also, in the grand scheme of Chicago politics, not exactly unusual. After all, this city has been run by rats — two-legged and four-legged — for over a century.
To their credit, Chicago’s finest treated Alderman Vasquez not as if his lyrics as a “battle rapper” were laced with frequent ACAB bombs, nor as a potential Jussie Smollett sequel, but with more respect than he is, in our estimation, due.
Funny though, with all that physical evidence and surveillance camera footage the real rat killer, to paraphrase OJ “The Juice” Simpson, still hasn’t been caught. No doubt the “Alderman” is still looking vigorously for the real killer, far beyond his bathroom mirror.
Naturally, Vasquez turned it into a media bonanza.
The rat stunt didn’t expose hatred in Chicago so much as it exposed Vasquez’s Pavlovian instinct to run to the nearest camera, putting the legendary camera hog Jessie Jackson, Sr. to shame. One dead rodent bought him three days of headlines. Not bad work if you can get it.
But eventually, absent a rodent mortician embalming service, dead rats get a little too rank for the reporters. So the “Alderman” dropped out of the ever-moving parade of the nightly news cycle.
What to do?
One imagines the “Alderman’s” “Brain Trust” in a furtive huddle, as portrayed in this fictional script from the way too long running comedy “Chico and the ‘Alderman’”:
“I know, man!”, says Chico (the guy who cooked up the rat caper?) He’ll get arrested by ICE. We won’t bail him out! Let me Google ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’. He can even sue the City and beef up the ‘campaign fund’. Julio, order some Modelo!”
Julio: “Wait, man. There’s no ICE in 40, there’s no cash bail because of the law Jelly Belly Pritzker passed.
Chico: “Alright, forget the Modelo.
No problem, man, ICE is in Broadview.”
Julio: “Where’s that, man?”
Chico: “In the suburbs, man?”
Julio: “The what?”
“Alderman” without borders
So, Vasquez, never content to fade from view, proceeded to this strange and distant land of Broadview to join protesters outside an ICE facility.
There, he did what he does best: Performed. He shouted, gestured, and planted himself in front of enforcement vans. Federal officers, busy with the job of enforcing immigration law, fired pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas while Vasquez and his brothers and sisters in solidarity obstructed justice. Protesters were cuffed. Vasquez wasn’t arrested, though you could tell he wanted to be. A mugshot would have looked great on his next campaign flyer.
Like our “new neighbors” here in El Norte, Alderman V. seems to subscribe to the “We don’t need no stinking borders” school of geography. Broadview isn’t in the 40th Ward. It isn’t even in the City of Chicago. The people Vasquez represents weren’t there. Their problems — garbage pickup, crime, taxes, schools — weren’t being addressed. Their alderman was out in the suburbs chasing photo ops.
If you want to block ICE vans, fine. Go join a non-profit. Go be an activist. But don’t pretend you’re representing Chicago taxpayers while you’re cosplaying Caesar Chavez in Broadview.
Socialism with Chicago characteristics
Vasquez is a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA’s Chicago chapter already has 12 percent of the Council, a dangerously high number that needs to go down to ZERO, starting with Vazquez! Their agenda is clear: Replace capitalism with socialism (a euphemism for communism), replace personal responsibility with permanent grievance, and replace ward work with ideological theater.
Vasquez is their poster child. He doesn’t chair committees that deal with budgets or infrastructure. He chairs the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights — a body that can’t actually change federal law but can provide endless opportunities for press conferences. It’s not governance. It’s cosplay.
Even New York’s next mayor (absent divine intervention) Zohran “Mad-mani” Mamdani, the socialist assemblyman many think is gunning for Gracie Mansion, would blush at Vasquez’s self-promotion. Chicago, meet your very own Karl Marx with a battle-rap mixtape.
Contrarian box score for the week
Let’s tally up Vasquez’s productivity for the people of the 40th Ward last week according to press reports (after all, all we know is what we read):
- Dead rats removed from ward office: 1
- Dead rats removed from actual alleys in 40: 0
- Constituents helped with tax appeals: 0
- Federal law enforcement agents yelled at: Too many to count
- Press appearances: 7 (local news, print, online)
- Potholes filled: 0
- Self-pitying press quotes: At least 3
- Political capital gained among socialist activists: Priceless
If Andre Vasquez were a football player, he wouldn’t make the roster. If he were a ball boy, he’d trip over the sideline marker. But in Chicago politics, failure is its own credential.
Rats, literal and figurative
The dead rat on Vasquez’s doorstep was supposed to send a message. It did — but not the one intended. It reminded us that Chicago is overrun with vermin, both animal and political. And just like real rats, the political ones survive by scavenging off the hard work of others.
While Vasquez poses for the cameras, the 40th Ward still struggles with crime, property taxes rising faster than incomes, and streets that look like they’ve been shelled by the U.S. Air Force. Residents don’t need virtue signaling poseurs, performance artists who couldn’t make it in rap. They need competence. And competence the one commodity Vasquez can’t deliver.
Final word: Time for the final mic drop
The 40th Ward deserves better than a socialist battle rapper moonlighting as an alderman. It deserves better than a man who treats politics as a stage and constituents as props. Andre Vasquez had a victim-fest of a week, but the real victims were the taxpayers stuck funding his act.
Chicago doesn’t need more martyrs, revolutionaries, or wannabe activists in public office. It needs aldermen who fight for the safety of their ward, fix potholes and sidewalks, and hustle to renew their wards. Until Vasquez learns that lesson — and let’s keep it real, he never will — the best thing voters can do is boo him off the stage and send him back to the open-mic circuit where he belongs, because in the end, Andre Vasquez is just another Chicago rat — louder, dirtier, and harder to get rid of than the ones chewing through our alleyways.
