Month: December 2006

Shocked in OP

UK Guardian-Observer’s Dan Pearson, who writes about gardens and gardening,

was shocked to see these vast, low-slung Arts & Crafts family homes littering crisp expanses of lawn in the wealthy Oak Park area on the edge of [Chicago]. Not a prairie in sight, but impressive nonetheless.

Shocked meaning delighted? I think so.  He is writing about prairies as having a comeback:

A way with the prairies [subtitled:]

When intensive farming muscled in on the American midwest, vast wildernesses were trampled in the rush. Now, says Dan Pearson, they’re rising again

So he is glad to see OP’s big lawns — contrasted, we know, by Hemingway with its narrow minds — as a good sign, in fact “impressive.”

Pearson refers to FL Wright and prairie style architecture as “developed in [Chicago] suburbs.”  But he “had only known [Wright’s] wonderful, iconic Fallingwater [in Western Pennsylvania], cantilevered over a cascade in woodland,” before seeing what any of us can see any day on Forest Avenue and elsewhere in OP & RF.  So he was “shocked.”  Meaning delighted.

Busing

Among “anomalies” cited by Chi Trib in an article about school busing is OPRF High School, which “won an exemption from [state] busing requirements by demonstrating that adequate public transportation was available.”  It’s busing by Pace in the two villages or (healthily) hiking.  And since nonexistent school buses do not get stuck in snow and ice, the high school never calls classes off for weather reasons.

Meanwhile, the eastbound Metra train drops a busload of Fenwick students every morning.  That school draws them from far & wide.  And those who keep going downtown on their way to St. Ignatius find a bus waiting for them at the Ogilvie Center.  Or did a while back.

Swamped

Was severely tempted to join the crowd commenting on Frank James’s posting, “How Could this happen to a citizen?” on the Chi Trib “Swamp” blog by its Wash. correspondents — “Beyond the headlines, beyond newsprint.”  James wrote about how badly suspected terrorist Jose Padilla was treated, as reported in NY Times.  But why should I help Chi Trib sell its web site when I can help sell my own, highly lucrative, site?

So here’s what I would have written, on this, my own, highly lucrative site: 

Frank James’s grandson to Frank many years hence: “And what did you do in the War Against Islamo-Fascism, Grandpa?”

Frank: “I did what I could to turn the populace against the Bush admin’s efforts to subvert our constitution, which my colleagues and I all consider a suicide pact, Frank the Third.”

I write this though my heart goes out to James, who found the pictures of Padilla “deeply disturbing.”  Indeed, James wrote,

On seeing these photos and reading the story, many Americans will likely ask, how can it be that an American citizen with due-process rights under our Constitution, a citizen who has not been found guilty of the allegations against him by a constitutionally sanctioned authority, was subjected to such treatment? What if he’s innocent?

Yes.  The beauty of blogging is its capacity to bring out deep feelings entertained by those we rely on to tell us what’s what in the world in fair and balanced fashion.  Way to go, Frank!  Up the blogosphere!

Go polar Saturday

Hey, kids of all ages, Tom Hanks’s “Polar Express” is showing for free at the Lake Dec. 9, 10 in the morning. It’s a grrrreat Christmas movie, part of Downtown OP’s (ahem) “holiday celebration.” Which holiday is just between us, OK?

But militant-Christian crack aside, the movie is marvelous. I know. I saw it Friday night on Channel 7. Kids even of an advanced age can use it to remember the realities, or ghosts, of Christmases past. Don’t remember a better cartoon — it’s semi-cartoon, product of our digital wonderland — and even the scary parts (parental presence required) thrill without chilling (I don’t think, but can’t be sure). Shades of “Snow White,” seen when just out as a young lad.

What makes the 46% tick?

Is tribalism the issue in the matter of mainstream Dems supporting Todd Stroger, son of stricken Cook County board president John Stroger, in the recent election that gave him 46% of the Oak Park vote? This was a vote cast in the face of uncontested overwhelming evidence of budget-busting favoritism in hiring of friends and supporters with minimal regard to competence and other standard criteria, not to mention honesty in handling other people’s money.

Our ranking Oak Park Dem, state Sen. Don Harmon, was named in an 11/22 Chi Trib editorial with many other ranking Dems who endorsed Stroger.  We may assume family matters for him, though Oak Park has traditonally shown a civic sense that counts for more than one’s tribe. It often does, anyhow, but not for the 46%.

That many do not care about hiring people with minimal regard for competence, etc. Tribalism may count among us also, but more likely livelihood or career — or those ol’ social values. Chief among these is the right to abort a fetus, with gay-rights issues not far behind followed from a longer distance by gun-banning and other such matters.

This is an interesting conflict, between social liberalism and political reform. It leads to asking if it is progressive — a cherished liberal description — to support the hiring of the incompetent or less competent because they will plant signs on street corners and knock on every door.

Race in Michigan, Iraqi democracy, Bush secretive, etc.

* Steve Chapman in Chi Trib: Mary Sue Coleman, U of Mich pres., protesting 58% vote against racial preferences in admissions, “has been a staunch champion of . . . correcting racial discrimination by practicing racial discrimination.” She defiant, standing in schoolhouse door.

* Slouching toward realpolitik: Trib’s Clarence Page: “Americans appreciate the neo-conservative dream of spreading democracy through the Middle East [once described by GW as a way to prevent terrorism], but the Iraq disaster offers us a painful lesson on the limits of our grasp.” Comment: How we deal with corrupt Iraqis is one thing, but leaving the field to the bad guys is another. There is such a thing as their morale too, is there not, to be strengthened by our departure?

* Devastating Novak column about firing of Rumsfeld and what it says about GW, who he says is “no malevolent tyrant” but like all Republicans in White House since Eisenhower, subject to “congenital phobia” about leaks. He is “secretive and impersonal” in his firing of people contrary to assurances. It’s “not a good sign for for his concluding years as president,” says N.

* “Autumn leaves, packs its bags,” begins a poem by Andrew McNeillie, “Les Feuilles d’Automne” in Times Lit Supplement of 11/17/06, leaving me to wonder for a fraction what that comma was doing there. Between subject and verb? Let’s not have it, OK? Then I saw that this was not the tried and true “autumn leaves,” adjective and noun, but the same, subject and verb, as in “Autumn leaves [and] packs its bags.” The poet had my attention.

* Up to 17 Chi aldermen are to be targeted for political extinction by Service Employees union. Question to be, per Mark Brown in Sun-Times 11/28, are they with the working man or not? No, it’s are they with the unionized working man or not. The workers paradise of total unionization not yet arrived, we must keep in mind union exclusivity. Some have no chance to belong to a union. Some choose not to when given the chance. Either way, workers of the world have not yet united, notwithstanding many a heartfelt appeal to do so, at least since Marx and Engels.

The chief beef against the aldermen and women is their vote against the “living wage,” a.k.a. big-box (store) ordinance which would have dictated what Wal-Mart and Target pay employees. This ordinance would have benefited the proletariat, say Service Employees, even as it kept out of Chicago a lot of low-price merchandise which the proletariat buys right and left: see shoulder to shoulder shoppers at the suburban Forest Park Wal-Mart, where the proles are finding what they want and the village is reaping sales tax to beat all.