EVERYONE in Chicago this week is trying to buy the T shirt Bill Savage is wearing on his holidays in Dublin, but it's Rot a matter of wandering into any retail outlet.
To wear this shirt, you have to have connections.
It's just a joke, right? Well, yes; aimed not at the city's visitors, however, but at its first citizen, Mayor Richard M. Daley.
It is understood that the mayor is not laughing. As the son of the mayor who won world attention for his handling of protesters at the last Democratic Party convention in Chicago, Richie - as he is known - has been doing his best to eradicate all reminders of 1968 from folk memory.
Unfortunately for Richie, certain city employees, among them members of the Chicago police force, have been waiting to get their own back on him since his own annus horribilis in 1983. That was the year Richie insisted on adding his name to the Democratic ticket in an effort to oust the city's first woman mayor, Jane Byrne.
He succeeded in splitting the Democratic vote three ways, and for a while it looked as if Chicago was going to elect a Republican mayor for the first time since the 1920s, when Big Bill Thompson - a close associate of Al Capone's - ruled the city while it earned its notorious reputation.
In the end, Chicagoans just about managed to elect the third and least likely Democratic candidate, Harold Washington, their first - and to date only - black mayor.
But the Democrats haven't forgotten the fright Richie gave them and when the party decided to return to the scene of the debacle in 1996, some entrepreneurial spirits on the Chicago police force seized the moment to retaliate.
They produced a range of exquisitely embarrassing T shirts. The version here is the third. Earlier wordings were variations on the theme of "We kicked your father, etc., and who knows what we'll do to you".
The producers decided this kind of ambiguity was unsuited to Chicago's robust style, and substituted a more direct message.
The shirts are made by cops for cops, and Bill Savage secured his because his father was in the force, and indeed on duty in August of 1968, though not wielding a baton. "He was handing out traffic tickets to people who ran red lights trying to get away from the riots," Savage said.
How has Mayor Daley reacted? Wisely, Savage said. He hasn't said a word.
Embarrassment, after all, isn't political death; at least not in Chicago. Apart from the fact that he presides over an efficient ethnic coalition in the local party machine, Richie knows he can rely on his taunters to turn out for him as loyally as ever at the next election.
The alternative party is still unthinkable. At least in Chicago.