Brooks: a Pollymanna short on details.

Chicago has its problems: it suffers under one of the biggest debt loads in the country. But it has thrived because it has had good leadership, a constantly updated housing stock, a good business environment and an ethos that attracts talent and celebrates blunt conversation.

I wonder what David Brooks thinks of the increased crime rates in say, Riverdale*.

*Riverdale, IL, violent crime, on a scale from 1 (low crime) to 10, is 9. Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The US average is 4. Riverdale, IL, property crime, on a scale from 1 (low) to 10, is 5. Property crime includes the offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The object of the theft-type offenses is the taking of money or property, but there is no force or threat of force against the victims. The US average is 4.
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You see, Brooks' style of reading goes down easy, if you don't care much about details...

I was working a temp job at Apple Computer in the mid 90s, and befriended a middle-aged woman, Dorthy, who worked permanently in the mail room. We clicked. Me, a college-educated temp helping the Marketing Manager, who, if truth be told, didn't really know much about computers, short of turning one on; she, an African-American mother and observant office worker, funny as all get out.

She befriended me (It was mutual: never sure how people read that word, as though there's an inferior/superior assumption that isn't meant.) or rather, at the time, we became friends. Met up after work once for drinks, and I remember her comments then about Cabrini Green, straight west of downtown in what became the gentrified "River North" area.

Sitting on prime development property,
the people there knew what was coming. For years, the nation's hellhole made headlines as a place essentially unfriendly to life. Remember your Moynihan: You just can't stack people, warehouse them in the air like that, and expect the city's troubles to stay locked in place and the good life to somehow thrive -- with no consideration given to the lack of underlying nutrients necessary to sustain healthy life.

Was no surprise then,
when in recent years Chicago chose to close Cabrini, evict/resettle some of the residents, and make more functional use of the choice piece of land. = "a constantly updated housing stock."

But if you look a bit closer, or live in affected areas, it was really just a shift. The Cabrini residents moved south, scattered to what housing stock they could find to meet their family needs. Crime rates in the working-class south suburbs, both black and white towns -- look at Riverdale, say -- have risen disproportionally.

You can play this as Chicago's "success", of course. And for the developer families like Rahm Emanuel's, such destabilization no doubt proves profitable in the end. Plus all the yuppies (do they call them that anymore?) have closer to downtown living options. Some of the big winners win again; many working-class continue to lose in their quality of life. We prefer to ignore the latter.

But let's not pretend that we're swallowing what the Pollymanna's like David Brooks and Rahm Emanuel are offering up.

Chicago -- Illinois -- is in a hurt of financial trouble. Brooks simply spins the elevated salaries, no doubt driven by Illlinois union success, as a positive -- evidence that the City Mice are somehow more successful and deserving than their rural cousins, making less but watching their dollars go further than in Cook County.

And Brooks doesn't seem to notice any link between those elevated salaries, particularly in the public sector, and the taxpayer deficits being continually run up that don't seem so laughable lately.

Crime is nothing to brag about, even if you don't factor into the equation those gang problems that have shifted out of Chicago's jurisdiction to neighboring areas within Cook County.

I wish I wasn't much of a critical thinker. Wish I didn't continually consume details of news here and there that don't reconcile so nicely with the narrative the press is preaching. Ignorance is bliss, they say, and the truth is more blunt than pretty.







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"Rahm Rahm Dirty Bomb"


My fears? That style of brash assholery that Rahm's past, aka Rahmbo!, promises he will bring to Chicago won't be so well received in all circles. "Do Unto Others...." seems to be less a character role for the man, as "He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules."

Problem is,
when it comes to paying the piper, braving the backlash, displacing people to prove some silly social theory that decades later doesn't work out so well in practice as promised? It's never Emanuel's people -- the upper class -- who are involuntarily displaced these days, it seems. It's the little people. Like all those affected by the realtor-induced "white flight" -- itself involuntary for the families directly affected -- back in the day.

(Please, do click that link on "blockbusting" if your liberal college education has led you to believe it was sheer racial prejudice, and not overwhelming economic disincentives, that caused every single family to move from select South Side neighborhoods in Chicago. Put bluntly, there was no choice to remain behind -- as white residents in the south suburbs indeed now do have, as the region naturally desegregates via honest market pricing, absent what is now illegal real estate buying/selling tactics.)

If a dirty bomb is detonated by a Middle East terrorist sleeper cell in Chicago's subway systems -- the city targeted because of the mayor's involvement in foreign political issues* -- do you think it's likely the mayor, along with thousands of everyday working innocents, will be travelling via public transportation that day and himself pay the price for his continual cage rattling? I don't think so.

Would we could say that the price paid by so many to racially desegregate the city has worked. But it hasn't. Look at the schools, the ghettoized areas, the lack of local leadership in the neighborhoods and communities. We're more segregated now -- our schools waaaay below 1960s basic education standards. Have we learned nothing from the failed promises of the past, and the depressing results that over time have proven -- perhaps another way would have been more effective, perhaps less lording from above, and more listening to what the affected people are seeing, thinking, and yes -- fearing, with good reason.

In detail,
this is what federally subsidized "community" and policymaker controlled planning from a distance looks like.

This is why so many fear federal healthcare and education reform dictated from young, not yet life-tested, wonks who seem to rarely leave their offices and know the real world only from what they see presented daily on their computer screens...

Come closer, Mr. Brooks. Spend more than a weekend running after Rahm in his leather and blue jeans. Revisit, and look to see how the planned promises of the past have worked out. Nevermind the tourist areas, and the Bean. Come talk to the people who have lived in the city -- continually -- without time out for education in the Wilmette suburbs, or public service in the nation's capitol. Be blunt in your assessments: not only what has worked, but most importantly, what hasn't. Where Mayor Daley, and his development pals, have profited in decades past but failed the people, many of the people, miserably.


I dare ya.

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ADDED:
*Say what you will about Mayor Daley -- either one -- and their public "Irishness", but neither felt the need for military service to defend the Irish Republic, nor did their children need to receive religious sacraments abroad, causing an international incident.

I'm glad that Rahm Emanuel is proud too, of his father's homeland and his ethnic upbringing. But I hope he grows up soon and recognizes that, unlike his national political jobs, his international opinions now have no bearing on the City of Chicago mayoral job.

Sometimes in fact, adjectives like "parochial" can be a good thing for the residents of a city.