This is the business we chose.

A comrade recently captured Bandolero’s sympathies via an email missive which read, in part, as follows:

Beg pardon as I whine … just having one of those days when I’m plain tired of dotting someone else’s I’s and crossing their T’s only to deal with some smart-ass kid from the City. Here’s all I’m looking for — these lines are from a scene in City Hall (whole picture’s good, by the way): [Kevin, the deputy mayor played by J Cousack, to the mayor, Pacino, suggests distancing themselves from a man in trouble]

Mayor John Pappas: “Distance”! Distance is something you do to your enemies. It’s a thing of the nineties, to make friends extinct. Distance… is the absence of menschkeit!

Kevin Calhoun: Translate that for me.

Mayor John Pappas: You don’t know what menschkeit means?

Kevin Calhoun: No, I don’t.

Mayor John Pappas: Menschkeit, you know… something between men… it’s about honor, and character… untranslatable. That’s why it’s Yiddish.

Kevin Calhoun: I didn’t know you’d taken up the language.

Mayor John Pappas: Abe laid it on me.

To be fair, though, it really is as Hyman Roth (in Godfather) put it: “This is the business we chose.”

You’ve had those days right? Where it just rolls over and over in your mind, “it shouldn’t be this damn complicated.” Well, enough of my wah-wah; this is probably reading more like a blog than an email.