Do Chicago Teachers Strike In Own Best Interest?

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It's no good pretending strikes take place out of social
context?   The Chicago Teachers' Strike is taking place
inside a city and state that have been hammered by
unsustainable pension commitments and economic
malfeasance at the highest level.

Illinois is at or near the bottom of almost every
measure of a state's financial health used by the
Federal Government.

The schools can not remain healthy if the state
and city are going down the tubes.  Yet the teachers
are only the first city employees to be negotiating
contracts over the next few years.    As David Brooks
points out, by middle class standards, teachers are
astonishingly well remunerated, but they have not been
remarkably successful:

The average Chicago teacher makes $76,000 a year in a city where the average worker makes $47,000 a year. Rising school costs have helped push the system deep into the red. Meanwhile, the outcomes are not good. Forty percent of students drop out and 8 percent of 11th graders meet college readiness standards.

Rahm Emanuel was elected to bring labor, especially pension
costs under control.  The generosity of this contract (a 16%
pay hike over 4 years), especially given the $3billion shortfall
that CPS faces over the next several years may make it more
difficult to obtain concessions from other unions while
negotiating fair contracts, the tightrope act the Mayor will have
to pull off to be a successful public servant.

Make no mistake, if Mayor Emanuel fails to pull it off, then
Chicago faces a Detroit-like future of slow dispiriting decline.
If the teachers have pushed for concessions beyond what is
affordable, they have worked against their own self-interest
in the long run.

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Chicago Street Incident

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I was coming back from the grocery, my cane of
course in my right hand, trailing a little cart with
my left.  I had entered the cross walk at the inter-
section of Eugenie and Wells.  I was having a little
difficulty maneuvering the cart and my head was
down.

Looking up I was headed right at young woman
on her cell phone.  She was looking straight at me.
In a moment her eyes de-focused and she shifted
her eyes to my right.  She didn't change her path.

I moved right, and we passed without incident, but
in that moment her eyes lost their focus I could see
that she had absolutely no interest in me as a human
being.  She made no adjustment for me.

 I might as well not have been there.

Maybe she wasn't really there.

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FLOAT: a super short Chicago story

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He had one of those laughs which sounds like an assault when it
comes up unawares behind you on the street, but as he passed her
she found her hatred of the abrasive laugh melting into an
undeniable sense of oneness with the still laughing man and his
fatuous sideburns, so sharply delineated along a 165º angle.

In another moment she grabbed at the air she lived in to keep
her balance as she found herself - right there on the sidewalk
on Wells outside the stucco busts of Second City - melting into
a strange oneness with all those coming and passing.  Did they
feel this oneness all the time?  No surely not.  Had anyone
ever felt it before?

Still she kept melting, struggling to keep her head up and her
lungs open,  feeling the danger was real, and she might really
go down under a single, infinite wave into this sudden ocean.
Had it always been there?  Could it continue to exist if she
drowned in it?

She wasn't panicking exactly, but she couldn't stop struggling
either, despite the voice inside her which kept counselling:

Float.

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The Weiners Circle - American Test Tube

The Weiners Circle is both a hot dog stand which
late at night-early in the morning is a popular haunt
of white Chicago & suburbanite singles and also
a new reality-game show on cable that is shot on
the actual premises of the Lincoln Park establishment.

The advent of the show has led Chicagoan Tai
Rosenberg to post on the Chicago Reader blog site,
The Bleader,  an essay on his own feelings towards
the exchange of late night abuse between patrons
and workers - much of it of a racist tinge - which has
become a phenomenon in itself.

The phenomenon is more fully detailed in Rosenberg's 
essay, which also features a short piece from the archives
of the This American Life television show.  One interesting
detail which emerges from Ira Glass's show is that Chicago
is so segregated that some sociologists have taken to using
the term hyper-segregation to describe the city.

After reading the essay, I went to the Yelp website and read
the patron reviews of the Weiners Circle.  Although most of
the reviews at least mentioned the food, the reviewers by
and large focused on the phenomenon which has supposedly
doubled the late night business at the Circle.

And also by and large the reviewers viewed the phenomenon
as benign, many encouraging the reader to go to Weiners and
join in the circle of abuse.  Still the Ira Glass piece made it
clear that feelings do get hurt.   I was particularly moved by a
worker who is to be featured on the cable show - and so whom
I'll not name - who admitted, "Of course it hurts when they call
me a monkey,"  though she quickly pointed out that she couldn't
afford to give up the job, so it didn't really matter how she felt
about the phenomenon.

Of course the well off whites who patronize the Weiners
Circle can afford to go out on the weekend while the
blacks behind the counter have to work.  To me this seems
the crucial difference:

After all, the whites are free to go out, get drunk and decide on
any particular weekend night whether they'd like to patronize
this particular hot dog stand and take part in the phenomenon
or whether they'd rather just pass it by, go home and pop a
frozen pizza in the oven.

The blacks are not.  They have to be there working in a hot
kitchen all night supporting themselves exchanging racial
taunts with well-heeled customers - weekend after weekend.

For the mostly white customers, the phenomenon is
entertainment; for the black workers, it's a sentence.

5:05 am

               

Where've You Been?

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For those of you wondering at my long lay off
from this blog, I've been correcting proofs and
wondering, Is there no end to error?

But now ARTIFICE, RUSE & ERDNASE:
The Search For One Who May Not Want To Be 
Found is in the hands of the printer, and I'm
starting a series of blogs to answer the question,
Who Was Erdnase?

The answer is we don't know.  He wrote under
a pseudonym and his full identity remains a mystery.
ARTIFICE,  RUSE  & ERDNASE* is about the
attempts to solve the mystery, my own efforts included.

He is an enigmatic figure, a lively writer notable for
a bracing honesty and an unfairly forgotten part
of Chicago history.  In the postings to come, I'll go
into all that about S. W. Erdnase which fascinates us.

*S. W. Erdnase was the author of The Expert at the Card Table,
also known as Artifice, Ruse & Subterfuge at the Card Table. 

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Mussourgnakov's End

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And finally he came to
Where good writers start
And failed writers find their end:

He turned to writing poetry.

--                                               _

It was perhaps because Chicago was the 
Eastern Europe of America that he felt 
so at home here.  -- Life of Mussourgnakov

Everyone Leaves Chicago

All artists eventually leave Chicago.   Bellow left;
Mamet left; RT Both left; even Nelson Algren left
Chicago.  Dreiser left.

Chicago is the undoubted center of comedy in
America, the prime feeder of New York and Los
Angeles with comic talent; and so the comics
leave quicker than anyone.

Actors leave, but when their welcome is worn
out in Los Angeles or life proves too lonely in
New York, they can return here and be
beloved.

Opera singers move here after they're famous,
want to have children and are going to travel
all the time anyway.  They don't leave, because
they never really lived here anyway, so there's
no sense of loss when they're gone.

I once had dinner with an agent in New York
who said she wouldn't rep me while I remained
in Chicago.  She didn't wait for me to ask why
before saying, "If you live in Chicago, you're
not careerist.  It's just the work for you - not
the career.  Come to New York, and we'll
take you seriously."

I'm glad I didn't move to New York to have
her rep me, because 4 months later she told
me she was leaving representation to work
on Martha Stewart's television show.

Fourth of July, Many Happy Returns of the Day

                          --
Before CHICAGO, City of on the Make, there was
William Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago. 

Published in 1894 it remains an incredibly good
read.  It holds one fascinated at how violent and
shameless American culture once was.

Around that time, 2 people a day were killed on
average in Chicago in cable car accidents.
Newspaper boys in the first decade of the
Twentieth Century were routinely beat up for
delivering the wrong paper.  27 News Stand
Operators were killed for selling the wrong
paper by 1913. 

People lived with a degree of risk we
would never accept today.    I wonder if
anything has limited America's potential
as much as our aversion to risk.

Fear keeps us from imagining  a form of
success really worth achieving.  Sharing
drinks with one of Chicago's best writers,
Tom Geoghegan at the Twin Anchors last
Thursday as an early Fourth of
July Celebration, he traced our woes as a
nation to one simple cause:

Chicago, the Midwest, has let America down,
producing nothing the rest of the world wanted
anymore, surviving on corn syrup sold to
mainly ourselves.

First Vivaldi, Now McDermott: The Four Seasons

THAT SUMMER FEELING

Of the four seasons, two are associated with longing and two with
nostalgia.  Spring is the height of cruelty, because it fills us with
longing for that which can never be:   the perfect romantic love,
in which consummation does not diminish the intensity of desire.

Fall is the other time of longing,
the time of longing for that yet to be, our own death.

Winter and summer are, of course, the times of nostalgia.
The holidays in early Winter console us for the deep loss
of not having lived in Victorian England, and so they
offer us the gift of nostalgia for an era in which we never lived.

Summer is the only season to provoke an intense emotional response
from our own personal lived experience.  Summer fills us with an
ardent nostalgia for the irrevocably lost mix of longing and suffering
which makes adolescence so aimless, befuddling and precious.

That Summer Feeling, Jonathan Richman

An interesting note on this summer nostalgia thing:
it begins while we're still teenagers, because we
already know it's passing;  and we're afraid we'll never
feel anything as strongly again. 

I remember, once when my brother Philip was still alive,
passing two privileged Lincoln Park teenage boys on the corner
of Fullerton and Orchard, right there by The Bourgeois Pig.
It was a clear winter evening, dark and cold but comfortable.
The houses around us were by and large lit up.  The older boy
was telling his brother in a confiding tone, sharing with him the
hard truths of life, "The people in these houses, they don't feel
anything anymore."