A [Bleeping] White Christmas

Merry Christmas from the shivering, snow-weary, frozen heart of America.

Complaining about the snow and cold in Chicago this year doesn’t carry the usual cachet. It seems everyone is frozen. My parents have 16 inches of snow outside their home in Portland, Ore., which diminishes the amount of carping I can do about the foot outside here. I do have a situation that I bet they don’t, however. My car’s tires are frozen to the ground. When I parked on the street a couple of days ago it was wet and slushy. Then the temperature plunged to zero and everything that was slush became solid ice. The car is frozen in place. And the defroster fan has stopped working.

But inside it’s warm and cozy, and I can sit and reflect on the year gone by. There were more ups than downs, and higher highs than the lowest lows. That’s a change from recent years. Everyone I worked with at HedgeWorld got laid off, leaving just me and an uncertain future. However some good things have come out of that upheaval. It jarred me out of a kind of professional trance and motivated me to branch out. I’ve been doing more writing.

A good friend, Aaron, who also lost his job earlier this year, and I are considering writing a book about journalism in the 21st Century. I’d started thinking about that after we got news of the HedgeWorld layoffs. He’d been thinking about it too, and our ideas seem to mesh.

A book that Aaron suggested I read, Betsy Lerner’s “The Forest for the Trees” has me thinking not only about the journalism book, but about a novel.

I’ve also been having some stimulating e-conversations with my old college journalism teacher, Rick Seifert, about online community journalism. So, professionally there are a lot of interesting possibilities in the coming year, and for the first time in many years I find myself looking at genuinely interesting and realistic goals.

Personally it’s been another challenging year in many ways, but it’s ending on a very positive note. I feel it’s been a year of moving forward on many fronts, rather than treading water or regressing.

I’ve spent much of the day relaxing, exchanging Christmas greetings with friends and loved ones, considering my overall good fortune and trying not to think about the creeping entropy I see all around. It’s been happening for months but over the past couple of days I seem to have become particularly attuned to it. Part of a gutter fell off the other day, yielding to the weight of the snow and ice that filled it. There’s the aforementioned frozen car and the problem with the defrost fan. My sinuses are bone dry with the cold and I feel like I’m getting a cold all the time. I feel like I can hear cavities growing in my head and that any day all my teeth are going to fall out. And beyond the physical, I am slowly filling with dread about the likelihood of social and economic disorder in the New Year.

No matter what economic corner you peer around, there is chaos and fear. Politically our best hope for “change” has been brought low, at least for now, by pervasive corruption and the blind greed of a megalomaniacal state governor. Indeed it seems many of our critical systems—especially political, financial and commercial—have been exposed as either questionable or outright frauds and their leaders as a parade of hacks and traveling medicine salesmen.

But that’s not very Christmas-y, is it? And maybe it’s not as bad as all that, anyway. I just need to adjust my thinking. For instance, that’s not ice coated slush-snow out there, it’s a soft white blanket, tucking us in for the winter. Rod Blagojevich isn’t corrupt, just a misunderstood entrepreneur.

There, I feel better. Don’t you?

Seriously, though, Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

The Chicago Way

Recently I’ve been engaged in a back-and-forth email chat with some college chums and a former college journalism teacher about a whole host of topics: the future of the media, the nature of information and education, overpopulation and other social topics. You can follow the whole string here, at Rick Seifert’s Red Electric blog.

Yesterday I brought up Rod Blagojevich’s indictment as an aside and today one of the participants commented that during the presidential campaign, there was a yearning for “a little less Harvard Law, a little more Chicago political machine….” This struck a chord with me.

I love Chicago; I have since I moved here in 1997. I read Mike Royko’s Boss before I moved here and thought I understood a little about corruption’s history here. I was even excited to work as a reporter here, and imagined myself breaking big stories on the Machine and winning all sorts of awards.

Eleven years later I’m on my second tour in Chicago, after having served three interim years in New York. While in New York, I read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, in which I learned a little about Tammany Hall and corruption in another big city. But FDR and Fiorello LaGuardia, and even to an extent Robert Moses, helped break Tammany Hall. Certainly there is still corruption in New York. However, Chicago exists today as if Tammany Hall had never been interrupted, as this Slate.com article suggests.

The Chicago Way isn’t cute and there’s nothing nuanced or romantic about it. At its dark heart it is cronyism, money and power. That’s it. The Chicago Way isn’t about “getting things done” for the sake of getting them done; it’s about getting them done so that someone, preferably an entire network of people, benefit personally. If you’re not in the network, any benefit to you is ancillary and perhaps not even intended.

Anyway, all of that is a typically long-winded way of introducing my response to my college friend:

You're far from alone in your Machine thinking. I recall quite a bit of nudging and winking among the national media and pundits during the election about how Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Axelrod were going to bring a little sharp-elbowed Chicago politics to Washington; you know, get things done "The Chicago Way." Make no mistake: Rod Blagojevich, while a fully a creature of his own making, learned from the masters of the Chicago Way. Mike Royko, in his book "Boss" about the first Mayor Daley (that would be Richard J.) suggested that the Chicago motto "Urbs in Horto," or City in a Garden, should instead be "Ubi est Mea?" or "Where is Mine?" And the first Mayor Daley was also famous for saying about city job seekers visiting his 11th Ward offices, "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

The cocktail party stories about Chicago politics are rooted in a much more difficult truth about corruption here. Axelrod is up to his neck in Chicago politics, and so is Emanuel. Obama himself was helped along by Machine hacks like Emil Jones, and has endorsed the likes of the current Mayor Daley (Richard M.) and the nitwit Cook County Board President Todd Stroger and Rod Blagojevich. My hope is that Obama will use the strength of his own brand to elevate himself above those roots and lift Axelrod and Emanuel up with him. I think he will, and I think he will leave the Machine behind. Richard J. Daley refused to run for president, although some thought he should, so the closest the Machine has ever come to having a candidate of its own making in the White House was John Kennedy. Once in power, Kennedy took Daley's calls, but certainly didn't give "da Mare" everything he wanted. But what the hell? Politics is a pay-to-play business, and some people can pay more and play harder than others. If the Bush/Rove reign has taught us anything it's that attaining the highest office in the land doesn't automatically filter out petty political provincialism.

A good site to poke around for another perspective on "The Chicago Way" is the Beachwood Reporter, run by a former Tribune reporter.

'Hey Blago … f--- you!'

I consider myself a pretty jaded person, for good or ill. I’m leery of panhandlers, I think even friends and family will take advantage of you from time to time if they think it’s in their own personal best interest and I don’t believe most of what politicians say.

But this Rod Blagojevich thing has me flummoxed. The sheer scope of the sociopathic behavior at work here is stunning. Even as the Illinois governor knew he was the target of a federal corruption probe, he sought the ouster of Chicago Tribune editorial board members and brazenly offered Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder.

The man who once boasted of his testicular virility seems instead to have been suffering from an acute case of procto-cerebralism. In addition to visiting the Tribune’s web site and checking out the federal complaint, also read this Blago profile from the February 2008 Chicago Magazine.

You could wait a lifetime and not encounter an antihero like Blagojevich anywhere in fiction, let alone in real life. I mean, Eliot Spitzer is probably thinking about Blagojevich, “Damn, that dude’s fucked up.” Seriously, Blagojevich was until recently considering making a run for president in 2016.

And, as it turns out, Blago’s better half, Patty, is just as into family values. Hey, the family that says “fuck you” to the world together stays together, or at least serves its prison sentences concurrently.

The worst part is, this helmet-haired dunce sold out his office, the state and the people of Illinois for what amounts to a few hundred thousand bucks. So let me put it in terms Mr. Blagojevich can understand:

Fuck you, Governor.