New feature:
——————————————-
Still current: A Short History of Oak Park: Volume 1, 2004-2005, by Jim Bowman. A Blithe Spirit Publication, available now at Lulu.com: $5 to download, $14 for the book. See more here and here.
Are you, with Sun-Timesman Rick Morrissey, ready to recall at this crucial moment in sports history what Tiger Woods and “countless other athletes and coaches” have said when faced with bad publicity about philandering, such as “Please respect my privacy as I go through this very personal situation”?
If you are, consider what Lisa Schiffren says at American Thinker. She begins in tentative agreement with Morrissey’s implied leave-it-be advice:
As a rule, the revelation that a married athlete (or actor, or rock star, or politician) has conducted extramarital affairs with [a] bevy of ”party girls” may titillate, but rarely has the power to shock. In those realms, these things happen. Entitled men. Willing women. Deceived wives. What’s new?
She promptly tells us what’s new. Aside from our “normal prurience at work,”
we are interested [mostly] because Tiger Woods, who may legitimately be the best golfer ever, had been turned into an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies. And of course, he was our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation. Who knew that the early reports of his betrayed wife Elin swinging at him with a golf club constituted literal icon-smashing?
Icon-smashing: the 8th– and 9th-century violent opposition to statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Tiger, a figurative icon, apparently got hit with a golf club by a woman scorned. (Hat tip to William Congreve.)
Schiffren’s point, however, is that we the people have been terribly deceived in the Tiger Woods matter, and what we see now is a terrible undeceiving. Floodgates have been opened, the toilet has been flushed, we are being shown how badly we have been fooled, and this makes it important that we know the awful truth.
We are staring [at this story] because we’ve been had. Betrayed. We see now that the image was all a fraud. The talent was real. But the things that made the public like Tiger personally — the low-key demeanor, manners, and sweet smile of countless sports-page photos, magazine covers, political analogies, and most important, product endorsements, was an act.
So?
The larger lesson here is about how much artifice — sustained, deliberate deception — goes into the construction of a public persona when there is profit to be made or power to be had.
It’s good that we be reminded that there’s a media machine out there waiting to fool us for profit or power.
Most of us, to be sure, did not venerate Tiger, at least not as one venerates a statue-as-reminder of saint’s virtue, etc. Some may even have gotten sick of seeing his mug everywhere. But he became a billionaire largely on the strength of all that exposure, and now the truth is out.
“One of the greatest athletes of our time is disintegrating in front of us,” says Morrissey — though “disintegrating” is a bit much; there apparently wasn’t much there in the first place.
What he means is that the image is collapsing, evaporating — an image that meant billions for Tiger, not to mention an enormous fund of heroic sports-writer material. Down the drain, gone forever. It’s enough to make a columnist weep.
Well, you see, some countries are rich and smart, others are poor and . . .
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
Not that the UN is smart. Not saying that. Never did say that.
Chi Trib’s Mary Schmich, who comes from a pretty big family in Savannah GA, tries out the idea for a city of three million:
Some days the big city feels like a big family and the powerful seem more like relatives than royalty.
On no days to this longtime metro area resident. And who but a job-seeker gets the royalty part?
Chicago had one of those days last week, when we learned that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, would be seen around town in a wheelchair for a while because she’s getting radiation treatment on a bone tumor in her right leg.
Mary and a miniscule percentage of the rest of the population had one of those days, but Chicago didn’t.
If you live in Chicago, there’s a good chance that no matter what you think of the mayor, the news of this latest manifestation of his wife’s metastatic breast cancer touched you in a way that felt personal.
How good a chance? None if you lived where people are shot and mugged every day or if you didn’t get a city job because you weren’t connected or for that matter if you realized you’d got the back of the mayor’s hand while running for re-election to county board presidency.
Reminds you of what Ezra Pound said about James Joyce’s handling of “beatiful” and “sordid” happenings in Portrait of the Artist:
[T]here is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation — without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality — and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exactitude.
It doesn’t remind you of that? How about this, also from Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce (New Directions, 1970)?
If Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth, in literature.
Mutatis mutandis, as skipping Armageddon and changing abominate to dislike and literature to newspaper column, it goes for this today about Mrs. Daley, whom I think should be sent a buck-up note and promise of prayers, and that’s all.
Now and then a cruise through the day’s hard-copy home-delivered Chi Trib that can’t make it past the Front Page . . .
* Which has two (2!) stories, assorted jump items, and three pix, one of which takes up half of what’s over the fold. Bigger story, with that biggest pic, is “A lethal legacy” — notice the non-verbal head, i.e., no verb there — subtitled “Poisonous defoliants still exact toll in U.S., Vietnam.” Smaller, much smaller type above, a sort of tag: “TRIBUNE WATCHDOG AGENT ORANGE.”
Was just asking at dinner the other night, or was it breakfast? Whatever happened to Agent Orange? So I’m an obvious audience for this story, with its French Impressionist-inspired art foto of woman on sick bed and other woman reaching to get her something on the dresser. Besides, I’m a sucker for “lethal legacy” stories. It’s that alliteration. Couldn’t they make it rhyme?
Can’t link you to my morning paper, of course, but on line we have this story and pix to go with it, one of which is below the fold on hard-copy p-1.:
It is clearly a story I should care about, and why go to church when I have the Trib to remind me of suffering in the world, not to mention how badly our government has behaved in having “neglected a lasting problem even as the health fallout has spread”?
I’m not grateful enough, and besides, it’s what Pulitzer prizes are given for, so can you blame them?
* Story two is “Young Chicago Muslim in the interfaith spotlight” — again a verb-free head. Verbs are for subtitles, as here: “Obama front man on religion wins top global prize.” Front man on religion? He leads the religion race? Obama’s pick to win?
It’s Eboo Patel, whom I have to admit I had not heard of. He got the Louisville Grawemeyer Award, of which also I have been unaware. Sorry, folks, it’s a story for among the truss ads or maybe a religion brief, unless . . . Yes, it will make me feel better about my Muslim brothers and sisters. No matter how nastily their brother and sister religionists behave sometimes. How nice to be reminded . . .
BTW, on line (and note well, reporters don’t do heads in either medium) the story is “Chicagoan wins global religion award,” which gives a slightly wider tinge to it for Trib readers. I think it does.
When the rubber hits the road, Jesuit obedience lives!
It was with a grim face that my Jesuit superior informed me and the community that I am being removed from my current ministry. This news caused great consternation and confusion for several community members: what was it that I had done? What could I possibly have done in less than four months to merit such an abrupt removal from my job?
Stiff upper lip in the work of Christ the King.
Of all things said as critique of the A-War speech, this rings truest (from Wall St. Jnl’s Kim Strassel):
President Obama missed a chance to win a war this week. Not the one in Afghanistan, but the one about Afghanistan with his party and the public. That political failure may yet undermine the real fighting.
The road to failure is paved with half measures.
I’m a little late with this, but Nov. 14 is not that long ago, is it? That’s when Democrat candidates for county board president showed up at the Oak Park library, brought together by Dem Party of OP (DPOP). The Veterans Room on the second floor was filthy with Democrats, including assorted other candidates, with potential judges predominating.
But the stars were the incumbent, Todd (John-son) Stroger, who came late, and three challengers: Terry O’Brien, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (former Sanitary District, does sewage treatment for the Chicago area); 4th Ward (Hyde Park) Ald. Toni Preckwinkle; and Clerk of (county) Courts Dorothy Brown.
O’Brien made most sense. He would repeal the one-cent Stroger sales tax increase right away, all at once. It’s a tax-base destroyer in his book. Sales proceeds are down 14% in the year ending June 30, admittedly a bad year for sales. But businesses are decamping for neighboring counties. Reduce the tax rate, he argued implicitly, and you will increase tax revenue. Even in Cook County, liberal doctrine can be mugged by reality.
The other two challengers were not so sure. Preckwinkle would make “incremental cuts” while encouraging “economic development,” talking with “regional planning councils,” and starting “a jobs program.” Oh my, as if the market were waiting to be goosed by planners and programs.
Brown came out for “new ideas, not new taxes,” leaving cuts unmentioned — but not before winning the Oak Park Library declamation prize hands down. Rather, hands up, one holding the mike, the other moving continuously — circling, jabbing, flip-flopping, as if directing an invisible orchestra, eyes darting to and fro, face wrinkling, decibels multiplying.
She ended one segment, to scattered applause, with something about “the American dream.” Ending another, when the moderator called time, she hugged him. Later, when she announced her no-new-taxes (!) policy, she perorated, reaching crescendo with a memorable “If Barack Obama can be president, Dorothy Brown can be president of the county board!”
Preckwinkle was bland in comparison, businesslike, and direct enough. County hires, she said, come from “a few ward organizations, one of them the president’s [Stroger's].” Jobs should be open to “the skilled” and spread around, especially to “Hispanics, [who] are underrepresented.”
Discussing the Forest Preserve district, O’Brien said he would consolidate it with the county. Brown would use “biometric technology” to monitor workers and would sell space for advertising on district property. Preckwinkle would rely on “professionalism,” keeping in mind that forest preserves are not just for recreation but are also “an ecological preserve.”
Forty-five minutes or so into the forum, Stroger arrived. “Had to stop at a funeral,” he explained. He said the board had “had a good three years” during his presidency, which would come as a surprise to many newspaper-readers. But it was “newspapers and television” that had decided he’s “a public enemy.” He had “found” a half-billion dollar deficit on entering office (slated to replace his stricken father on the ballot) and had worked it down to $238 billion, he said. To make up the shortfall, he had raised the sales tax.
He was glad he had done so. “You don’t hear complaints about services. We operate efficiently.” As for cutting taxes, “you have to be responsible,” he said. “You need money to do things.”
To a question about how the board might operate more effectively, Preckwinkle said she would bring “a new tone,” persuading commissioners to be “respectful of each other” and not engage in “hurtful personal interaction.”
“You lead by talking to people,” said O’Brien. “You must reach out to other elected officials.” Brown echoed that, saying they should pay more attention to “Springfield.”
Stroger portrayed opponents as “playing to the camera,” which he said “has become a way of life” for them. He said he had asked intended tax-cutters to show how they would avoid cutting services, but they had no answer. “We can take no money away” from services, he said, especially health system services.
Opposition to his leadership was “all posturing,” he said, but added, “We get along very well.” Again, the problems were caused by “the press.”
In the matter of spending and bidding on contracts, O’Brien said he was “shocked” to learn that expenditures of “up to $100,000″ did not require board approval. But Stroger denied it. The limit was $25,000, he said. “All is done through requests for proposal,” he said. “We run things in a very professional way.”
O’Brien said there should be one procurement department for all of county government. He would do audits of every department, streamlining and consolidating as was done at the triple-A bond-rated Water Reclamation District, which last year returned $56 million to taxpayers. The district had 3,000 employees in 1988, when O’Brien became a commissioner; now it has 2,000, the reduction gained entirely by attrition, he said.
Preckwinkle blamed the patronage problem on the absence of public financing of elections. [No: see comment from her campaign below] She would take no money from county employees, she said: It “smacks of coercion.”
Stroger repeated his emphasis on non-interruption of services: “You’re going to hear a lot of things,” he said. “But nobody is saying they are not getting what they need.”
The House and Senate health care bills give us
an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency. Throw a dart at the Senate tome:
–You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.
–You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age.
Currently insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.
–You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.
Charles Krauthammer has a solution:
The bill . . . should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.
Then do health care the right way — one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness and inefficiency.
Which means zero in on tort reform, interstate buying and selling of health insurance, and taxation of employer-provided health insurance.
Trial lawyers don’t like the one, the left doesn’t like the other, which obviates need for public option, and unions don’t like the last
The lawyers are big-bucks people who give heavily to Dems, the left we have always with us, unions love big government, by whom most of their members are employed.
“Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative,” says K. in today’s Chi Trib.
The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
Better to “attack . . . inefficiencies . . . one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits.”
A bill that did that would be shorter — 20 not 2,000 pages — and pay for insurance for the uninsured “without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.”
And don’t get him started on the economic recklessness part.
These comments in Wednesday Journal on the FBOP-Park National Bank closing at the hands of FDIC frame the argument nicely.
First, a typical Oak Park response, echoed in dozens of comments in columns, editorials, and letters:
Posted: Thursday, November 19, 2009
Article comment by: ScottWe should be outraged that a community bank like FBOP was taken by the FDIC. Large institutions like Citi and Bank of America received millions of dollars in TARP money and what did they do? Spent most of it to pay our [for?] incentives or severence pay outs to CEOs and CFOs who were so greedy they left the institutions on near bankruptcy. Community Banks like FBOP who care about the communities and their employees were not able to receive any funding from the goverment.
If Mike Kelly was able to obtain money from private investors to put FBOP in a well capitalized state, then why didn’t the FDIC give them that opportunity? Instead they sold to US Bank who will in turn lay off employees and change a quality bank with great customer service and standards to something like Chase and Citi, who’s [sic] only concern is profit and loss. Not helping the communities they serve or the employees that work for them. It is tragic what they did to Mike Kelly and FBOP.
Then a cogent rebuttal:
Posted: Thursday, November 19, 2009
Article comment by: Stephen MicklinPlease excuse my apparent blindness, but I don’t see why everyone is so outraged about the FDIC’s takeover of FBOP Corp. Maybe I need to look at the facts through Oak Park tinted glasses, because with an objective eye the hoopla appears ludicrous and unreasonable. Let me highlight three aspects of the FBOP outrage that are, well, outrageous.
First, FBOP is to blame for its failure, not the FDIC or “Washington.” This obvious fact has someone been misconstrued. When the FDIC seized FBOP and arranged a deal with U.S. Bankcorp it was not acting with a vendetta against FBOP or favoring Wall Street over Main Street. The FDIC was doing its job—protecting depositors from losing all their money. FBOP fell into financial disarray because of misguided and greedy investments. Instead of keeping their money safe by buying Treasury Bills or other secure assets, FBOP decided to make a risky investment in Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac. FBOP wanted to squeeze out additional profits. Unfortunately those wagers backfired when the housing market collapsed. FBOP failed because it made bad investments. What is more, if not for the FDIC and U.S. Bankcorp’s actions, thousands of people could have lost their entire life savings.
Second, just because FBOP and Park National are now U.S. Bankcorp, it does not follow that neighborhood businesses and people will lose access to credit and banking facilities. If businesses and people are worthy of credit, other banks will step in to provide such loans. And if other banks refuse, then maybe those borrowers should never have received credit. Anyone would love a bank that extends credit on extremely favorable terms. Hey, subprime loans were a good idea for those receiving the funds. That does not mean, however, that such actions are sound banking practices. If Chicago and Oak park businesses and people are reliable borrowers then the absence of FBOP will not matter because other banks will rill FBOP’s shoes.
Third, people should not be angry that the FDIC had to spend $2.5 billion, they should be angry that FBOP forced them to spend the money. Had FBOP not made bad investments, the FDIC would not have had to use taxpayer money to protect customer’s deposits. Yet somehow the FDIC is being bashed. During a recent community meeting arranged to discuss FBOP’s failure (The protest gets formal), Oak Park Village President David Pope was quoted as saying “Two and a half billion dollars comes out to $25,000 for every man, woman and child in Austin. If you’re aware of the facts in this case and you’re not absolutely outraged, then you’re not alive.” I agree that the FDIC’s spending of $2.5 billion of taxpayer money is terrible, everyone should be. But we should be made at FBOP for forcing the FDIC to spend that money.
Maybe I am the only one in Oak Park with these views. Or maybe I am the only one looking at the facts without a hometown bias. Either way, the world will survive without FBOP Corp.
Not quite the only one.
I am shocked, shocked! to hear these ministers talking this way about the Cook County board president race.
A group of African-American ministers encouraged [Dorothy] Brown and [Toni] Preckwinkle to get out of the race because they say African-American votes will split up, allowing a white candidate to win.
They are the Concerned Clergy for a Blacker, I mean Better, Chicagoland. Also Friends of Todd, which won’t sit well with Friends of Dorothy and Friends of Toni.
