Shit. It’s been more than a month since the Indignant Citizen’s last post. Where the fuck has the time gone? So many days, so much pent-up indignation. Thank God we’re Winning the War on Terror, the Economy is humming thanks to those tax cuts, and Americans are coming to their senses that the Drive-In Utopia is a failure. If it weren’t for those nuggets of good news, boy, things would look bleak indeed.
As it is, though, life is wonderful. Things couldn’t be going much better. Well, except for those poor bastards getting blown up in Iraq. That’s gotta suck for them. But what the hell? They died for our freedom, and a grateful nation thanks them … in between pro wrestling matches and video game marathons.
Plus, somewhere the names of the dead soldiers got read this past weekend at one of the countless Memorial Day celebrations. So right there that’s pretty cool, getting your name read out loud. And the families of the dead soldiers all get nice free flags to keep and maybe put on the mantle. Oh, and they get the eternal gratitude of our Commander in Chief, President Bush. That’s almost as good as having their loved ones still around. Maybe it’s better sometimes, ‘cause Bush doesn’t come home from his third tour in the Gulf all stressed out and eating everything in the house and beating the dog.
Yep, life is good here in the U-nited States. Which must be why we have time for meaningless diversions like the U.S. Paintball Championships, which aired Memorial Day on ESPN2. They were on TV at the restaurant where the Indignant Citizen and his wife ate Monday night. This restaurant, The Patio, in Bridgeview, had about 30 televisions hanging from the ceilings and tucked into the corners, to promote conversation, no doubt. About half the TVs were tuned to the ridiculous paintball tournament. In true ESPN fashion, there were slow-motion shots of the “teams” high-fiving, fist pumping and engaging in some kind of pre-tournament group chanting and rhythmic jumping ritual to get pumped up for competition. There was actually a crowd in the stands.
We are a stupid people who have cultivated a vapid, image-worshipping culture. When we are punished for this wasteful behavior, it will be swift and thorough, and no one will be spared. In the meantime, though, we pretend to occupy ourselves with “serious issues.” The TVs in the restaurant that weren’t showing the paintball “championships” were tuned to CNN, which was airing a special on eating disorders and the fabulously famous, wealthy and beautiful people who have survived them.
Eating disorders are serious issues for those who suffer from them. And plenty of people have died from the effects of bulimia and anorexia. But who are these people suffering from eating disorders? Based on a very small sample size, which includes the CNN show Monday night and other news programs that have aired previously, eating disorders appear to be a disease of leisure. Which is to say, the people suffering them typically are not portrayed as living paycheck-to-paycheck. They appear to be people with the time and resources to become obsessed with their body image. Teenagers, celebrities, athletes—people solidly in the middle class or above.
The Indignant Citizen would like to see a profile of, say, a single mother working two jobs to support her kid who suffers from an eating disorder. Or a married father of three working the swing shift at the steel mill who has an eating disorder. The Indignant Citizen’s suspicion is, again based on the evidence thus far presented, that neither of these two people would have time to develop an eating disorder. Who has time to obsess about body image or binging and purging when you’re worried about paying the electric bill next month, or coming up with enough overtime to buy new clothes for the upcoming school year?
Who wants to starve himself or herself when it’s uncertain exactly when the next meal might be eaten? Who wants to gorge and throw it all up when there’s no telling how the next meal might be paid for?
Diseases of leisure. Diseases which, while very real to those who suffer from them, are the product of an image-obsessed culture with too much time on its hands and no real desire or need to apply itself to solving serious problems.
Take the CNN report itself. Certainly Paula Zahn and the CNN production crew responsible for putting the piece together felt they were doing a tremendous service to thousands of people—informing them of potentially deadly disorders, disorders suffered by many in silence and shame. But what if CNN had applied itself equally to the task of informing home buyers of the dangers of adjustable-rate mortgages, which former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously and inexplicably touted in a speech in 2004? ARMs seemed like a great idea at the time, when interest rates were at record lows. But certainly Greenspan had to know that eventually rates would rise, and that anyone who had traded in a fixed-rate mortgage for an adjustable-rate mortgage would end up paying more in the long run, short-term savings aside.
Now millions of people who took his advice are paying more, and according to a story in the Tribune by Becky Yerak, mortgage defaults are on the rise. Rising interest rates and their impact on adjustable-rate mortgages are one reason why.
At the time there was plenty of discussion in the print media—although mostly in the financial pages—about whether Greenspan had lost his fucking mind. But would CNN have spent an hour, as it did with eating disorders, focusing on the merits and risks of adjustable rate mortgages? And if it had, would anyone have watched? How many more people would have stood to gain from an in-depth discussion of ARMs? Probably millions.
So when the Indignant Citizen’s across-the-street neighbors get evicted from their house because they can’t pay the mortgage any more, they’ll blame the government, the banks and probably the oil companies. But at least their 14-year-old daughter will know where to go for help to treat her eating disorder. That is, if she has time to have an eating disorder anymore once she’s working the 6 p.m.-to-close shift at the Culver’s or Wal-Mart to help her parents make ends meet.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Contact the Inidignant Citizen
At the risk of inviting spam and other crap, you can now send email to the Indignant Citizen at IndignantCitizen(at)hotmail.com. The Indignant Citizen will not necessarily care what you have to say, nor is there an implied promise to respond carried in the disclosure of the Indignant Citizen's email address.
But it's there for use by interested, thoughtful and honest people.
But it's there for use by interested, thoughtful and honest people.
The Death & Life of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs died Tuesday. With her passing at age 89, cities lost one of their most intelligent and eloquent advocates, and the world lost an important voice for truth, beauty and rational thought.
Jacobs made a life and a living thinking about cities—how they work, why they work, who makes them work. She had no formal training for this livelihood, which is to say she did not have an advanced degree in urban planning or sociology or economics. In her last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs had hard words for modern higher education, writing that today it has devolved into mere credentialing. “… [A] degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous,” Jacobs wrote. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Instead of relying on credentials with no real education backing them up, Jacobs read on her own, observed, thought about what she saw and wrote what she thought. An early result was her devastating critique of Modernism and urban renewal, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was Jacobs’s first major work and is today considered the bible of modern urban planning … which is ironic since Jacobs professed little use for professional planners.
The Indignant Citizen still remembers the first time he read “Death and Life.” It was a revelation. Jacobs put into simple words many things the Indignant Citizen had observed about his own environment but lacked the language to explain. The importance of lively sidewalks. The advantages of mixing building types and uses. The Indignant Citizen isn’t going to go into all the brilliance of “Death and Life.” Read it yourself. You’ll be glad you did. It will change forever the way you look at and think about cities.
Of the many things Jacobs wrote and said, only one sticks out as having seemingly been proved wrong. In “Death and Life,” published in 1961, Jacobs wrote: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”
She was right on the first part. But we turned out not to be so deserving of her optimism. Jacobs was decidedly more pessimistic by the time she wrote “Dark Age Ahead.”
“The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears,” Jacobs wrote. “We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”
Jacobs identified five “pillars” of culture she believed were in danger: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental power in touch with needs and possibilities; and self-policing by the learned professions.
“They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.”
That’s so like Jacobs. Simple, elegant prose conveying highly complex and well-thought out ideas that make the reader react with forehead-slapping recognition. Who else would dare to write a book warning humanity of an impending Dark Age, and explain so clearly exactly what she meant?
Even in “Dark Age,” Jacobs managed to convey a sense of hope that perhaps if we were to heed her warning, the Dark Age could be avoided. The book was published in 2004. Recent events could not have provided much in the way of hope for Jacobs in her last days. Oil prices continue to rise, and in response we are using more gas this year than last. Elected officials should be talking about realistic alternatives to a mass motoring culture, like rebuilding the railroad infrastructure, but are instead calling for probes of oil companies to investigate possible price gouging. We seem to be blowing each other up with increasing frequency. Intolerance is on the rise.
And all the while our vapid culture celebrates style over substance and embraces ever more emptiness. The Dark Age looms. Thankfully Jacobs won’t have to see it envelop us. If we’re lucky her message will penetrate just enough to ward off the most serious effects. It worked with “Death and Life.” Urban renewal and the Garden City movements were exposed as frauds, and New Urbanism was born.
The pessimist in the Indignant Citizen says it’s too late to save ourselves. With Jacobs gone, a great advocate for us has been lost. Her voice has been silenced, and we are left with only her work to guide us. Will it be enough?
Jacobs made a life and a living thinking about cities—how they work, why they work, who makes them work. She had no formal training for this livelihood, which is to say she did not have an advanced degree in urban planning or sociology or economics. In her last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs had hard words for modern higher education, writing that today it has devolved into mere credentialing. “… [A] degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous,” Jacobs wrote. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Instead of relying on credentials with no real education backing them up, Jacobs read on her own, observed, thought about what she saw and wrote what she thought. An early result was her devastating critique of Modernism and urban renewal, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was Jacobs’s first major work and is today considered the bible of modern urban planning … which is ironic since Jacobs professed little use for professional planners.
The Indignant Citizen still remembers the first time he read “Death and Life.” It was a revelation. Jacobs put into simple words many things the Indignant Citizen had observed about his own environment but lacked the language to explain. The importance of lively sidewalks. The advantages of mixing building types and uses. The Indignant Citizen isn’t going to go into all the brilliance of “Death and Life.” Read it yourself. You’ll be glad you did. It will change forever the way you look at and think about cities.
Of the many things Jacobs wrote and said, only one sticks out as having seemingly been proved wrong. In “Death and Life,” published in 1961, Jacobs wrote: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”
She was right on the first part. But we turned out not to be so deserving of her optimism. Jacobs was decidedly more pessimistic by the time she wrote “Dark Age Ahead.”
“The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears,” Jacobs wrote. “We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”
Jacobs identified five “pillars” of culture she believed were in danger: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental power in touch with needs and possibilities; and self-policing by the learned professions.
“They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.”
That’s so like Jacobs. Simple, elegant prose conveying highly complex and well-thought out ideas that make the reader react with forehead-slapping recognition. Who else would dare to write a book warning humanity of an impending Dark Age, and explain so clearly exactly what she meant?
Even in “Dark Age,” Jacobs managed to convey a sense of hope that perhaps if we were to heed her warning, the Dark Age could be avoided. The book was published in 2004. Recent events could not have provided much in the way of hope for Jacobs in her last days. Oil prices continue to rise, and in response we are using more gas this year than last. Elected officials should be talking about realistic alternatives to a mass motoring culture, like rebuilding the railroad infrastructure, but are instead calling for probes of oil companies to investigate possible price gouging. We seem to be blowing each other up with increasing frequency. Intolerance is on the rise.
And all the while our vapid culture celebrates style over substance and embraces ever more emptiness. The Dark Age looms. Thankfully Jacobs won’t have to see it envelop us. If we’re lucky her message will penetrate just enough to ward off the most serious effects. It worked with “Death and Life.” Urban renewal and the Garden City movements were exposed as frauds, and New Urbanism was born.
The pessimist in the Indignant Citizen says it’s too late to save ourselves. With Jacobs gone, a great advocate for us has been lost. Her voice has been silenced, and we are left with only her work to guide us. Will it be enough?
Monday, April 24, 2006
Reality Bites
Sometimes on days like Friday, when the tulips stretch toward the warm sun and the air is filled with the sound of chirping birds, it is possible to forget for a moment just how doomed our culture is. But then, like a wad of shit dropped from the ass of a passing pigeon, reality smacks us in the face.
Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.
Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.
“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”
As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.
At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”
Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.
The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”
Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.
Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.
This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.
All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.
Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”
No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.
Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.
Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.
“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”
As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.
At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”
Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.
The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”
Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.
Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.
This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.
All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.
Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”
No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Never Saw it Coming
Well, well. What did the Indignant Citizen find when he opened his morning Sun-Times? Why, this story quoting John Stroger’s son , Todd, on his father’s condition. It’s the first hard update on the county board president’s rehabilitation in weeks, and not surprisingly it came from family. And not only that, family with something to gain by going public. Looks like Todd may end up being his dad’s successor. That is shocking. Just shocking.
Chicago News Media Stroger Grade: F
The Indignant Citizen doesn’t want to keep kicking John Stroger when he’s down. There’s only so much abuse one can heap on an elderly stroke victim before people start to call it Unfair.
So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.
In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”
She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.
Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.
According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”
Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.
Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.
The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.
So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.
In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”
She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.
Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.
According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”
Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.
Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.
The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Death Rattle for the Good Guys
It was around 11 p.m. on Election Night, and Channel 7’s Alan Krashesky was interviewing Cook County Board Presidential candidate Forrest Claypool at Claypool’s campaign headquarters. Claypool spoke for just a moment, but his tone said everything that needed to be said about his chances at that hour. And if there was any room for doubt, it was erased when Krashesky asked Claypool what he thought of the numbers coming in.
They were encouraged, Claypool said. But you could tell they really weren’t. It was still early, he said. But actually it was quite late. They probably wouldn’t know the outcome until morning, Claypool predicted. Wishful thinking. By then the deal was done. John Stroger has retained his icy death grip on the Cook County Board.
As of midnight, only 39% of the precincts in Cook County had reported results. New electronic voting systems throughout the county and in the City of Chicago had had a rough day of it. There were reports of malfunctions, of voters being turned away, and of others leaving frustrated after long waits and erroneous information offered by incompetent election judges. Results were trickling in. The bad news for Claypool, who was leading 53% to 47% at the time, was that two-thirds of the suburban Cook County precincts’ votes had already been counted while fewer than half of the votes in Stroger’s stronghold—Chicago’s South and West sides, and the south suburban towns—had been counted. That meant that most of the rest of the votes would go to Stroger, and he would likely close the gap by morning.
What does that mean for Cook County? No one is sure, because no one other than Stroger’s family and close political operatives has been allowed to see him since he suffered a stroke last week and was wheeled into the hospital. Information on his condition has been closely regulated. His supporters and those delusional enough to believe them insist Stroger will be back humping county taxpayers … er, whoops … running the county in no time. Good as new. Doctors have been more guarded, insisting he will recover, but only to some baseline of greater disability than the overweight, diabetic, high-blood-pressure-suffering Stroger was at before.
In the background during a Stroger campaign headquarters stand-up by Channel 7 reporter Charles Thomas was a podium with a microphone sticking up like a bare and thorny winter rose bush on the prairie. The Indignant Citizen wondered if that would be a preview for upcoming County Board meetings—an empty microphone at Stroger’s Board President seat barking orders to the Patronage Army. Or maybe the Democratic committeemen will find a qualified replacement from among the ranks of the Chicago Department of Streets & Sanitation. Either way the Machine won. Again.
It has often been said that in its heyday the Machine could have run a dead man and gotten him elected. These, then, may be the new Glory Days for the Machine. An elderly stroke victim enters the hospital a week before the primary, no reliable information about his condition is released … & he wins, riding a wave of support generated from Democratic party regulars like Mayor Daley, Bill Clinton and Rod Blagojevich.
All three of them gave positively stomach-turning performances on Stroger’s behalf this last week, especially Daley. When asked at a press conference Thursday a very logical question about what would happen if Stroger couldn’t run in the general election if he won the primary, Daley reacted by accusing the reporter of “putting John Stroger in the ground.” Daley and everyone else then message-shifted into “Stroger’s Not Dead” mode and claimed the only Right thing to do for a man who had done so much for the county was to support him in the primary.
In the end, Stroger’s stroke gave his listless soldiers a rallying point. Claypool had been coming on strong, beating Stroger with his waste and corruption and mismanagement. What was beginning to sound like a death rattle for the Machine instead wound up choking off Claypool’s momentum.
By the time the sun sets on Wednesday, it’s likely John Stroger’s name will have more votes next to it. What will it mean? Nothing good for county taxpayers, that’s for sure. Either we get four more years of Stroger’s hacks, or the hacks get to choose a hack of their own after slicing up the county payroll and coffers in a series of back-room dealings to get everyone On Board behind a Stroger stand-in.
May as well bend over now, folks, here it comes again.
They were encouraged, Claypool said. But you could tell they really weren’t. It was still early, he said. But actually it was quite late. They probably wouldn’t know the outcome until morning, Claypool predicted. Wishful thinking. By then the deal was done. John Stroger has retained his icy death grip on the Cook County Board.
As of midnight, only 39% of the precincts in Cook County had reported results. New electronic voting systems throughout the county and in the City of Chicago had had a rough day of it. There were reports of malfunctions, of voters being turned away, and of others leaving frustrated after long waits and erroneous information offered by incompetent election judges. Results were trickling in. The bad news for Claypool, who was leading 53% to 47% at the time, was that two-thirds of the suburban Cook County precincts’ votes had already been counted while fewer than half of the votes in Stroger’s stronghold—Chicago’s South and West sides, and the south suburban towns—had been counted. That meant that most of the rest of the votes would go to Stroger, and he would likely close the gap by morning.
What does that mean for Cook County? No one is sure, because no one other than Stroger’s family and close political operatives has been allowed to see him since he suffered a stroke last week and was wheeled into the hospital. Information on his condition has been closely regulated. His supporters and those delusional enough to believe them insist Stroger will be back humping county taxpayers … er, whoops … running the county in no time. Good as new. Doctors have been more guarded, insisting he will recover, but only to some baseline of greater disability than the overweight, diabetic, high-blood-pressure-suffering Stroger was at before.
In the background during a Stroger campaign headquarters stand-up by Channel 7 reporter Charles Thomas was a podium with a microphone sticking up like a bare and thorny winter rose bush on the prairie. The Indignant Citizen wondered if that would be a preview for upcoming County Board meetings—an empty microphone at Stroger’s Board President seat barking orders to the Patronage Army. Or maybe the Democratic committeemen will find a qualified replacement from among the ranks of the Chicago Department of Streets & Sanitation. Either way the Machine won. Again.
It has often been said that in its heyday the Machine could have run a dead man and gotten him elected. These, then, may be the new Glory Days for the Machine. An elderly stroke victim enters the hospital a week before the primary, no reliable information about his condition is released … & he wins, riding a wave of support generated from Democratic party regulars like Mayor Daley, Bill Clinton and Rod Blagojevich.
All three of them gave positively stomach-turning performances on Stroger’s behalf this last week, especially Daley. When asked at a press conference Thursday a very logical question about what would happen if Stroger couldn’t run in the general election if he won the primary, Daley reacted by accusing the reporter of “putting John Stroger in the ground.” Daley and everyone else then message-shifted into “Stroger’s Not Dead” mode and claimed the only Right thing to do for a man who had done so much for the county was to support him in the primary.
In the end, Stroger’s stroke gave his listless soldiers a rallying point. Claypool had been coming on strong, beating Stroger with his waste and corruption and mismanagement. What was beginning to sound like a death rattle for the Machine instead wound up choking off Claypool’s momentum.
By the time the sun sets on Wednesday, it’s likely John Stroger’s name will have more votes next to it. What will it mean? Nothing good for county taxpayers, that’s for sure. Either we get four more years of Stroger’s hacks, or the hacks get to choose a hack of their own after slicing up the county payroll and coffers in a series of back-room dealings to get everyone On Board behind a Stroger stand-in.
May as well bend over now, folks, here it comes again.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Forrest Claypool’s ‘Stroger Dilemma’
“Of course it’s not true! But let’s make the bastard deny it!”
— Hunter S. Thompson quoting Lyndon Johnson during a 1948 U.S. Senate campaign in Thompson’s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.
Somewhere, the late Richard J. Daley is looking up—or down, depending on how things worked out for him—at Cook County Board President John Stroger and shaking his bald head in admiration. “There goes a real down and dirty SOB,” Daley is saying. “That man knows how to Get It On.”
Coming from Daley, the inventor of the Machine, that is high praise. If you’re not from Chicago, all you need to know about John Stroger is that he is the modern-day Daley, the boss of the Cook County Democratic Machine. Stroger commands an army of patronage workers amassed over the 12 years he has presided over the county board. His work history, according to his biography on the Cook County administration website, reads as follows: Cook County Commissioner, Attorney, Chicago Park District, Special Attorney to the General Attorney of the Chicago Park District.
As near as can be determined from that information, Stroger has ventured out of Cook County only once for an extended period in his 76 years on Earth: when he left town to earn a Bachelor’s degree at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He got his law degree from DePaul and since then has been a “public servant” in one form or another.
Stroger also happens to be black. Which would not be important except for two reasons: He is often cited as being a role model for young blacks and he has a tendency to remind people that he is black when it becomes politically necessary. Recently he has played the race card with abandon when one or another of the white county board members has challenged his bloated budgets, called attention to the astonishingly blatant nepotism and ineptitude he has brought to Cook County’s employment practices, or revealed yet another in the seemingly infinite layers of corruption poisoning the county’s public services.
It just so happens one of those white county commissioners, Forrest Claypool, is running against Stroger in the Democratic primary for county board president. Claypool has styled himself as a “reform candidate,” which these days just means he has not yet managed to use the County as his own personal employment agency and ATM—at least not to anyone’s knowledge.
Any Cook County resident (read: taxpayer) with half the average number of functioning brain cells would pull a Democratic ballot on Primary Day just to vote for Claypool. Stroger has run a down and dirty campaign, which is to be expected. In TV ads he has accused Claypool of everything except hating little old ladies, child molestation and kicking puppies. In one TV ad, Stroger claims Claypool has voted against funding breast cancer screenings, against a prescription drug program for seniors, against funding jail guards. Which is all true, technically, because Claypool voted against Stroger’s ridiculously oversized 2006 budget proposal. But in voting against it Claypool was taking a stand against waste and corruption. Stroger of course knows this but has no shame. In an editorial on March 14, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Stroger’s ad campaign is a series of lies. Not misinterpretations, not fudging – outright, bald-faced lies. He was playing Lyndon Johnson’s game—make Claypool deny he’d done those things. “If Claypool played this loopy game,” according to the Tribune, "he would say that Stroger, by supporting the 2006 budget, voted for continued abuse of children at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.”
And maybe Claypool had an ad ready to go that said exactly that. Except that on the day the Tribune’s editorial ran, eight days before the primary, Stroger was taken to the hospital where doctors said he suffered a stroke.
The local TV media played the story for all the gravitas they could wring out of it, airing breathless live reports from serious-sounding reporters standing outside the hospital—not, by the way, the county’s brand new hospital with Stroger’s name on it, but a private hospital nearby. “His medical records are there,” as the news credulously quoted a county spokesperson. At any rate, there was much talk of Stroger’s condition, which no one really knew, and whether he would stay in the race. No one questioned the timing of Stroger’s trip to the hospital—a week before the primary—and no one mentioned the backdrop: Stroger’s flagging poll numbers in the face of Claypool’s persistent flogging.
If news watchers felt confused during the day by the conflicting reports on Stroger’s health coming from the county mouthpieces, and from Stroger’s own staff, Claypool’s campaign had to be suffering from whiplash. Early in the news cycle, Stroger had merely gone to see his doctor because he felt tired. Then it was fatigue. Then he had been taken to a hospital. It took until the end of the day, when Rush Presbyterian doctors finally spoke to the media, before anyone mentioned the word “stroke.”
By then Claypool’s campaign had scrambled to yank its own negative ads—such as they were—off the air. Stroger was doing enough race-baiting on his own, it would have been extremely bad form for a white challenger to have TV ads running that labeled an elderly black politician and recent stroke victim “sleazy” and a fraud. Accurate, but definitely in bad form.
Stroger is as corrupt as they come. A relative of his handles communications for the Cook County Forest Preserve District, perhaps the most inept and bumbling bureaucracy ever created since the dawn of time. To head the county’s troubled Provident Hospital, Stroger hired John Fairman, a man who has left a trail of mismanagement allegations and financial behavior bordering on, but apparently never crossing over into, criminal at nearly every executive position he’s ever held.
The list goes on and on. And we should be talking about it at length. Claypool could have run a head-turning campaign based simply on the premise that he’s Not Stroger. But he didn’t. And now it may be too late.
Stroger no doubt will stay in the hospital until at least the day of the election. Why not? He has effectively short-circuited Claypool’s campaign, which had been gaining momentum. Every major newspaper in Cook County had endorsed Claypool. Only old ward heelers and party hacks like Carol Moseley-Braun and Bill Clinton had thrown their support behind the tired old Stroger. Bill Clinton? Voters might rightly ask what the fuck Bill Clinton knows about Cook County politics. The answer is it doesn’t matter. He knows enough to know Stroger helped turn out the black vote for Bill in 1992 and 1996. It’s payback time.
As for Moseley-Braun, she too was probably reminded that Stroger had once backed her, even if he hadn’t (he backed her challenger in 1992). You see Stroger’s habit of bringing up race whenever he’s challenged on something extends to veiled exhortations for African-Americans to support their own at the polls. But, as with so many things Stroger says, his actions loudly contradict him. Aside from the Moseley-Braun snub, Stroger supported Richard M. Daley over the late Harold Washington in the 1983 mayoral primary (Washington won); in 1989 he backed Daley again over black candidate Tim Evans in a special mayoral election and in 1991 Stroger again snubbed the African-American candidate to back Daley. A more exhaustive list of Stroger’s “support” for fellow black candidates can be found on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s blog .
When the TVs showed the grainy footage of Stroger being taken out of the ambulance, wrapped in blankets from head to toe, some in Claypool’s campaign probably thought “This is it. Ding dong, the witch is dead.” They’d have been crazy not to. Their candidate’s deficit in the polls had shrunk to 10 points, and it may have been dead even including the margin of error. The machine was grinding to a halt just as the campaign was entering the stretch run.
But now … ah, now. Now it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. If Claypool doesn’t ease up he could face a backlash not only from the black community but from senior citizens, stroke victims and anyone who’s ever felt disrespected by younguns. If he eases up he could lose the momentum he’s gained in recent days and wind up handing Stroger the primary win on a plate. Or maybe a hospital food tray.
Stroger will probably live. The question is if he does, can Cook County live with him for another four years?
— Hunter S. Thompson quoting Lyndon Johnson during a 1948 U.S. Senate campaign in Thompson’s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.
Somewhere, the late Richard J. Daley is looking up—or down, depending on how things worked out for him—at Cook County Board President John Stroger and shaking his bald head in admiration. “There goes a real down and dirty SOB,” Daley is saying. “That man knows how to Get It On.”
Coming from Daley, the inventor of the Machine, that is high praise. If you’re not from Chicago, all you need to know about John Stroger is that he is the modern-day Daley, the boss of the Cook County Democratic Machine. Stroger commands an army of patronage workers amassed over the 12 years he has presided over the county board. His work history, according to his biography on the Cook County administration website, reads as follows: Cook County Commissioner, Attorney, Chicago Park District, Special Attorney to the General Attorney of the Chicago Park District.
As near as can be determined from that information, Stroger has ventured out of Cook County only once for an extended period in his 76 years on Earth: when he left town to earn a Bachelor’s degree at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He got his law degree from DePaul and since then has been a “public servant” in one form or another.
Stroger also happens to be black. Which would not be important except for two reasons: He is often cited as being a role model for young blacks and he has a tendency to remind people that he is black when it becomes politically necessary. Recently he has played the race card with abandon when one or another of the white county board members has challenged his bloated budgets, called attention to the astonishingly blatant nepotism and ineptitude he has brought to Cook County’s employment practices, or revealed yet another in the seemingly infinite layers of corruption poisoning the county’s public services.
It just so happens one of those white county commissioners, Forrest Claypool, is running against Stroger in the Democratic primary for county board president. Claypool has styled himself as a “reform candidate,” which these days just means he has not yet managed to use the County as his own personal employment agency and ATM—at least not to anyone’s knowledge.
Any Cook County resident (read: taxpayer) with half the average number of functioning brain cells would pull a Democratic ballot on Primary Day just to vote for Claypool. Stroger has run a down and dirty campaign, which is to be expected. In TV ads he has accused Claypool of everything except hating little old ladies, child molestation and kicking puppies. In one TV ad, Stroger claims Claypool has voted against funding breast cancer screenings, against a prescription drug program for seniors, against funding jail guards. Which is all true, technically, because Claypool voted against Stroger’s ridiculously oversized 2006 budget proposal. But in voting against it Claypool was taking a stand against waste and corruption. Stroger of course knows this but has no shame. In an editorial on March 14, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Stroger’s ad campaign is a series of lies. Not misinterpretations, not fudging – outright, bald-faced lies. He was playing Lyndon Johnson’s game—make Claypool deny he’d done those things. “If Claypool played this loopy game,” according to the Tribune, "he would say that Stroger, by supporting the 2006 budget, voted for continued abuse of children at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.”
And maybe Claypool had an ad ready to go that said exactly that. Except that on the day the Tribune’s editorial ran, eight days before the primary, Stroger was taken to the hospital where doctors said he suffered a stroke.
The local TV media played the story for all the gravitas they could wring out of it, airing breathless live reports from serious-sounding reporters standing outside the hospital—not, by the way, the county’s brand new hospital with Stroger’s name on it, but a private hospital nearby. “His medical records are there,” as the news credulously quoted a county spokesperson. At any rate, there was much talk of Stroger’s condition, which no one really knew, and whether he would stay in the race. No one questioned the timing of Stroger’s trip to the hospital—a week before the primary—and no one mentioned the backdrop: Stroger’s flagging poll numbers in the face of Claypool’s persistent flogging.
If news watchers felt confused during the day by the conflicting reports on Stroger’s health coming from the county mouthpieces, and from Stroger’s own staff, Claypool’s campaign had to be suffering from whiplash. Early in the news cycle, Stroger had merely gone to see his doctor because he felt tired. Then it was fatigue. Then he had been taken to a hospital. It took until the end of the day, when Rush Presbyterian doctors finally spoke to the media, before anyone mentioned the word “stroke.”
By then Claypool’s campaign had scrambled to yank its own negative ads—such as they were—off the air. Stroger was doing enough race-baiting on his own, it would have been extremely bad form for a white challenger to have TV ads running that labeled an elderly black politician and recent stroke victim “sleazy” and a fraud. Accurate, but definitely in bad form.
Stroger is as corrupt as they come. A relative of his handles communications for the Cook County Forest Preserve District, perhaps the most inept and bumbling bureaucracy ever created since the dawn of time. To head the county’s troubled Provident Hospital, Stroger hired John Fairman, a man who has left a trail of mismanagement allegations and financial behavior bordering on, but apparently never crossing over into, criminal at nearly every executive position he’s ever held.
The list goes on and on. And we should be talking about it at length. Claypool could have run a head-turning campaign based simply on the premise that he’s Not Stroger. But he didn’t. And now it may be too late.
Stroger no doubt will stay in the hospital until at least the day of the election. Why not? He has effectively short-circuited Claypool’s campaign, which had been gaining momentum. Every major newspaper in Cook County had endorsed Claypool. Only old ward heelers and party hacks like Carol Moseley-Braun and Bill Clinton had thrown their support behind the tired old Stroger. Bill Clinton? Voters might rightly ask what the fuck Bill Clinton knows about Cook County politics. The answer is it doesn’t matter. He knows enough to know Stroger helped turn out the black vote for Bill in 1992 and 1996. It’s payback time.
As for Moseley-Braun, she too was probably reminded that Stroger had once backed her, even if he hadn’t (he backed her challenger in 1992). You see Stroger’s habit of bringing up race whenever he’s challenged on something extends to veiled exhortations for African-Americans to support their own at the polls. But, as with so many things Stroger says, his actions loudly contradict him. Aside from the Moseley-Braun snub, Stroger supported Richard M. Daley over the late Harold Washington in the 1983 mayoral primary (Washington won); in 1989 he backed Daley again over black candidate Tim Evans in a special mayoral election and in 1991 Stroger again snubbed the African-American candidate to back Daley. A more exhaustive list of Stroger’s “support” for fellow black candidates can be found on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s blog .
When the TVs showed the grainy footage of Stroger being taken out of the ambulance, wrapped in blankets from head to toe, some in Claypool’s campaign probably thought “This is it. Ding dong, the witch is dead.” They’d have been crazy not to. Their candidate’s deficit in the polls had shrunk to 10 points, and it may have been dead even including the margin of error. The machine was grinding to a halt just as the campaign was entering the stretch run.
But now … ah, now. Now it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. If Claypool doesn’t ease up he could face a backlash not only from the black community but from senior citizens, stroke victims and anyone who’s ever felt disrespected by younguns. If he eases up he could lose the momentum he’s gained in recent days and wind up handing Stroger the primary win on a plate. Or maybe a hospital food tray.
Stroger will probably live. The question is if he does, can Cook County live with him for another four years?
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