The Creator Of @MayorEmanuel Reminds Us Chicago Is Screwed

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 23, 2016 9:58PM

Dan Sinker, a.k.a. @MayorEmanuel (left) meets the actual Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2011, just after Sinker's Twitter account went dark (photo via Daniel X. O'Neil on Flickr)

“What’s happening in Chicago right now isn’t funny,” wrote Dan Sinker, the Twitter genius behind the parody account @MayorEmanuel, in a new Medium post about his hallowed, now-defunct Twitter.

Sinker says he abandoned the Twitter account once Mayor Rahm Emanuel was elected to his first term because, “the idea of ridiculing the day-to-day work of trying to fix the city never appealed to me ... [A]nd the way that reality has played out in the last five years has only born that instinct out.”

Much of Sinker’s post is spent explaining what long-time Chicagoans (and/or Twitter users) already know: The account was beloved and got a lot of press; Sinker wrote it anonymously; there are now a lot of copycat political parody accounts on Twitter and most of them—such as “Hillary Clinton’s Vag,” which Sinker mentions in passing—are deeply bad.

However, Sinker also offers some analysis of Chicago then and now. Of Chicago five years ago, he wrote:

It’s hard to remember after the five hard years since, but there was a great deal of hope following the end of 22 years of the Daley administration. This was an opportunity to rebuild a city that had been broken by decades of neglect and insider deals. The city and the schools were in debt by hundreds of millions of dollars. Public pensions had been underfunded for decades and threatened to make the financial situation even worse. The city had stopped growing in the previous decade — census numbers published almost simultaneous to the election showed that Chicago had shrunk by 200,000 people, nearly half of which were African-Americans. And on and on and on. People wanted to believe that a new administration — the first in two decades — would bring about change and fix the many real problems the city faced.

Of Chicago since Mayor Emanuel’s election, Sinker wrote:

The actual, real Rahm Emanuel, it turns out, hasn’t done a great job at turning things around. The debt is more crushing than before, the schools haven’t pulled back from the precipice they were on five years ago. The pension debt has becomes such a huge problem that the entire state of Illinois hasn’t had a budget in nearly eight months in part because nobody seems to know how to fix it. The shrinking population contributed to school closures that were hugely unpopular and mired in scandal. Then there is the violence—shootings in the city are double what they were this time last year, a staggering 292 victims with 51 murders in January alone — and the growing exposure of police murders and coverups.

This isn’t just a damaged Chicago, this is by pretty much every measure a destroyed Chicago. People want to lay all that destruction at Rahm Emanuel’s feet, and while his permanent headfake demeanor certainly hasn’t helped and there are plenty of bad decisions that are of his making, the reality is far more complex and unforgiving. This is a series of slow-motion disasters that have been decades in the making, and will probably take just as long to turn around.

You know your city’s in trouble when even Twitter comedians feel like it’d be tasteless to joke about current events, and turn serious and longform-y. Still, Sinker's analysis feels solid—and at this point, he might have more Chicagoans’ loyalty than the actual Mayor.

Let us finish with one of the account’s more timeless tweets, to lighten the mood?

A message with bipartisan appeal.