Category: Blithe Spirit

Some do not come running

Chicagoans for Rio! is the Fox-Chicago Channel 12 WFLD-TV’s execrable, damnable minute and four seconds that — heavens to Betsy! — portrays a web site that argues against and provides testimonials against Chicago 2016 Olympics. 

Horrors! Disloyal! Woefully outside the box! Clearly a case of The Enemy of the People arising in our midst.

Just so you can judge for yourself how horrible and disloyal, the site is Chicagoans for Rio 2016, which says

It would be exciting to host the Olympics here in Chicago.  But you know what be even better?  Rio de Janeiro.  Just let Rio host the 2016 Olympics.  We don’t mind.  Honest.

Second City vs. Marvelous City.  Go marvelous!

And for a capsule commentary that sums the Rio First concept, look to Larry Horist’s letter in Sun-Times:

First and foremost, all those businesslike economic projections flowing out of City Hall and the Chicago boosters are fabrications, theories. . . .  Should we get the Olympics, the costs will be higher than projected and the income lower. The promised ancillary benefits will never materialize. The [deleterious] impact on the working-class taxpayer will be significant.

. . . . [V]irtually every independent accounting authority says the city’s projections are nothing but hype. Even the promised insurance policy that is supposed to protect the taxpayers is full of holes — billions of dollars in costs will come out of Chicago workers’ paychecks. Our hard-earned money will be redistributed to the rich and powerful friends of City Hall.

In the twisted irony of Chicago politics, those who will scoop up millions of dollars in windfall profits will have the best accommodations, the best seats, the best parties. The working-stiff footing the bill will watch the hometown Olympics on television, find it impossible to get into a restaurant, stand in long lines for entertainment venues and have to make their way to work in super congestion. I say: Go! Go! Rio! [Italics added]

Oh, and by the bye and FYI, Drudge has it that the Chicago Olympic Committee said don’t run that minute and four seconds clip, because

its broadcast “would harm Chicago’s chances” to be awarded the games.

The station’s news director ordered staff to hold fire after the report aired once last Thursday morning, claims a source.

The committee is right: the Go Rio movement would hurt their project.

 

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Mysterious zoning

An oracular explanation is sought at Chicago’s long-overdue Department of Zoning Oversight Fellowship Forum for a favorable outcome at City Hall.  First, PDB channels keys:

If you lose your keys, you might put yourself in their place and ask, where would I be?  Then you might be able to find your keys through a sequential path of logic, or you might just stumble across them by dumb luck.  Both result in a found set of keys, but only one path demonstrates that something is at work here beyond your understanding, a higher order.

Fair enough.  As for the long-sought favorable outcome in which the zoning administrators gave approval for three (3) sets of drawings, leaving the architect with incomplete “cosmic understanding” of what happened:

Since there appears to be no sequence of logic here, it fits that Zoning exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.  Some might call it divine.

He thanks “the oracle,” likening the challenge to “trying to take the white out of rice.”

Always on Sunday: In the liberal park with Clarence

I appreciate Chi Trib’s Clarence Page because he tells me how libs are reacting to this or that issue of the day, like the recent guerilla journalism practiced in l’affair ACORN.

This catching of ACORN people in the act was done by “pranksters,” he says. Conservative objections to ACORN demonstrate an “obsession.” Fox News’s Glenn Beck becomes “deranged” at the mention of it, as in his anti-newspaper crusade: “Pick up the phone” and call one to complain, urged Beck.

All in all, the video prank became an “embarrassment [that] sends to the world the worst possible picture of low-income Americans, the very people whom ACORN is supposed to help.” (No fair!) It “spurred Washington’s usually sluggish funding gears to spin into warp drive,” says Page, stretching metaphorical possibilities. How about, It turned off the spigot?

Page alludes to ACORN’s voter-registration fraudulency, finding consolation in a claimed lack of voting by Mickey Mouse and others. He notes Obama’s legal pleading for ACORN in a motor-voter case in 1995 but says nothing of his teaching ACORN people how to do things the Alinsky way.

Neither does he say anything about ACORN’s Alinsky-style picketing and muscling of bankers in its push to give out mortages to people who later defaulted and helped the real estate market sputter and slow to a crawl. Nor of Obama’s recent professing ignorance of ACORN’s prolific funding by the feds over many years. Nor of Obama’s presidential campaign’s hiring ACORN for millions within the last two years.

But one does not read Page for that sort of information. One reads him to catch the latest on what libs are saying, and one should not complain but be thankful for what one gets when he opens up his Tribune op-ed page on any given Sunday.

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Instant response: Friendly challenge from Rick in Ann Arbor:

Clarence Page ought to check with his personal psychoanalyst, just to make sure that his parole from the Mental Hospital is still good.  . . .  HOw can he possibly judge that my objection to ACORN is an obsession ???  Beside being of dubious intellectual talent, is he also a Board Certified Psychiatrist ??

Not that I know of.

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Trying to win one for the ‘Bammer

How obvious can you be?  This weeper was big on today’s Chi Trib front page:

When 17-year-old Brianna Rice was diagnosed with celiac disease in February, she had health insurance.

She doesn’t now.

In the months that followed her diagnosis, her insurance company, American Community Mutual Insurance, combed through her medical records and ruled that her parents lied on her application last year.

In May, American Community not only canceled her policy, but also rescinded coverage all the way back to the day it started — Nov. 1.

Etc. 

Add Georgie Ann Geyer’s column of personal trial-morphed into argument for ObamaCare, and you have a one-two effort to massage believers and seduce fence-sitters:

WASHINGTON — I am sitting here, filled with a disbelief so profound about those of my fellow citizens who don’t seem to believe that we are in the grasp of horrendous health-care and insurance problems that I could scream, were not so many others screaming!

I could buy the ensuing sentiment if it were about impending economic dissolution through national debt that throttles growth and inflates the cost of everything in sight:

[I]t would seem that many Americans still don’t believe we have a deadly serious dilemma. It’s the old “It-can’t-happen-to-me” theme, mixed up with the ridiculous idea that government can’t do anything good at all. So let me offer my own personal story.

It’s a sad story, well told.  But she urges on us a course that will lead to a much sadder one for most of us, being “deeply touched,” as she is,

by the overarching idea behind President Barack Obama’s speech last week. “It is wrong,” he said, for not all Americans to have health insurance, “and nobody should be treated that way in the United States of America.”

Or anywhere else?  Sad it is that a smart woman with decades of experience in analyzing and deciphering world problems would so judge a national crisis as to find herself

wondering whether those who are so perfervidly against government-run alternative health insurance care at all about those of us whom the private health-care system has treated with such errant and selfish shabbiness. Who knows? Maybe next time it will be one of them.

Maybe next time it will be all of us sinking into economic and civilizational mediocrity in a fond, foolish hope inspired by deeply touching oratory.

Meanwhile, how about a newspaper with editors who aren’t so obvious about where they stand?

Later, from Reader M.: I had the same impression you did when I got my Tribune Daywatch this morning.  Yes we need healthcare reform – I get it.  Let’s deal with unscrupulous insurance companies.  Better yet, let’s deal with ambulance chasing lawyers. 

But let’s not rush into something because of a tug at the heartstrings – whatever we decide to do in a moment will take years to undo, if it is poorly crafted.  My daughter lives in Canada, and has seen the real deal when it comes to government healthcare.  She is not impressed.  Neither am I. 

I am not happy with the status quo, but I don’t want a system that will ration care or limit my options if I choose to invest my own money in my health.

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What’s the quota?

“Where’s the diversity?” asks Wednesday Journal head.  “[One] minority among 36 new teachers ‘unacceptable,’ says Collins.”

Of the 36 teachers hired for the current school year in District 97, one is a minority, a development that the Oak Park’s elementary district’s superintendent calls troubling and unacceptable.

She’s not kidding:

Along with hiring one black teacher, the district hired one minority administrator, an assistant principal, who also is black. In a stern statement read during the board’s meeting last week, Superintendent Constance Collins vowed the district will do better next year in finding and hiring minority teachers and administrators.

Nothing against white teachers, you know:

The superintendent and board . . . stressed that they’re not displeased with the new staff members but only want more diversity moving forward.

And fewer whites, who do nothing for diversity.

The super feels really bad about it:

“It is disappointing and troubling to discover that we have not been true to our mission, which says that we are committed to the needs of a diverse population,” said Collins, the district’s first female and first black superintendent, who was hired in 2005.

“The needs of a diverse population,” yes.  Such as?

I asked in an on-line comment, “Is there research showing same-race teachers get better results? I’d like to see it.”

Is there?

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Short histories are best

My Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 1, 2004-2005, announced on the first page, is based on my Wednesday Journal columns of those years.  They drew on my life-long affiliation with this, the world’s once largest village, home of Hemingway, Rice Burroughs, and Ray Kroc.

Ditto for Short History, which is in the self-publication tradition of

Margaret Atwood, William Blake . . . Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers . . . Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence . . . John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

I am delighted to see Shelley among them. Blithe Spirit in this context is, of course, based on “To a Skylark,” as was Noel Coward’s play title. I make that clear enough on the third page of Short History, quoting:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert-

That from heaven or near it

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

— from Shelley, “To a Skylark”

Go Shelley.  Go Short History of Oak Park.

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Later, from fellow Midwest Writers Assn. member Hal Higdon, in the matter of self-published authors, with a Hemingway-esque twist:

I hope you didn’t miss Rick Yager, the long-time Buck Rogers artist. His older sister was a friend of Hemingway, who once fired a revolver in the Yager house. The bullet may still be in the ceiling. Of course, I tell you this after the fact.

More about the industrious and adept Higdon, who ran seven marathons in his 70th year (he told me, and I believe it), here.  Indeed, soon to be published is his novel Marathon.

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Can gays change? An Oak Park debate

What’s forbidden in the matter of black-white relations is mandated in gay-straight ones, namely a genetic explanation.  As it is not allowed in general discourse to allege racial cause for black behavior, so it is required to say gays are born gay without hope of change.

See how the issue is argued in Oak Park, Illinois:

At the time, I didn’t believe there would be any opportunity for a discussion, but rather a one-way stream of hate, which would have likely led to health care-like forum shout-downs,

wrote Oak Park Trustee Ray Johnson about the Buzz Cafe book–author appearance to talk about gays becoming straight through prayer and therapy.  The “hate” involved would be the contention that gays can change, vs. their being destined from birth to be gay.

[Buzz-owner] Laura Maychruk had a right to offer a forum to promote hate, but people certainly had a right to protest the poor taste of that event, and Maychruk had the right (and I believe the responsibility to her community) to cancel that event,

wrote Oak Park resident Rachel Weaver in the same issue of the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, which had run the story about cancellation of the author-appearance, the author being a black Christian clergyman of inexact provenance [oops, see below], the book self-published (and Amazon-available) as Transition: From Homosexual to Preacher. 

Again, the hate is the claim that gays can change and are not irreversibly programmed, a claim that Weaver compared to promoting “the Tuskegee Experiment” and “forced conversion of all Jews to Christianity.”

What really gets me . . . is the suggestion that people offended that Laura would offer to hype this book and make Mr. Williams money from his hatred of gay people shouldn’t have [told] her [their objections].

wrote David McCammond-Watts, referring to the reaction that led to the cancellation.  Again, the hatred accusation relates to the claim that gays can change.

We need not even consider the reaction there would be if a speaker argued for a genetic cause for blacks’ low marks in school or rates of incarceration.  It’s not going to happen, any more than the author appeared at Buzz Cafe arguing against it for gays.

Later: Not so uncertain provenance at that.  Williams co-founded his “church without walls” in 2005, calling it “Holy Remnant International Ministries.”  He was commissioned, as it were, by Rev. Leroy Elliott, pastor of the New Greater St. John Community M.B. Church, at 3101 W Warren Blvd. on the West Side, since 1978. 

Rev. Elliott: 

Rev. Leroy Elliott

Missionary Baptists go a way back, to the early 1800s, in fact, per Wikipedia, which says their goal was

to organize para-church institutions for the promotion and funding of evangelism (particularly in foreign lands and on the American western frontier)

etc.

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Obama vs. the individual

Creepy collectivism in these lines from the classroom speech?

If you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country….

Don’t ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America [is] about people…who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best….

What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?…

Someone like him, he means, making it explicit:

I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down. Don’t let your family down or your country down.

I? Us? Then family and country. Wow. “Creepy” is right, “the president as national dad.”  Straight from the shoulder of the Maximum Leader.

Or as Dr. Helen asks, “Who Cares What Presidents Think?”

Rather than this “What can you do for your country?” stuff, she refers to Milton Friedman:

The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny.

The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors, and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.

Can you imagine getting elected representative of the 7th Illinois district on such a platform?  Telling people about their glorious personal responsibility?  After 70–plus years of creeping creepy collectivism?

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