Journalist Discovers "Cities"

Film at 11.

According to David Brooks, apparently cities are important.

Cities magnify people’s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them.

And Rahm Emanuel is a super-duper guy.

...
Emanuel was a colorful figure in Washington, but back home he’s off the leash.

He’s clearly a much happier person — glowing, bouncing, reminiscing and hugging. Gone are all the death-grip battles with Republicans and the Washington interest groups. Now startled people in sweatpants greet him when he shows up at their doorway, sometimes wrapping him in an embrace and sometimes bringing their kids out to pose for pictures. Nearly every single person he meets gets an ebullient high-five, though the cause for each celebration is not always clear.
...

As a strong advocate for cities, and an admirer of the raw-boned beauty of municipal government, I have little to quibble with in the flattering portions of Mr. Brooks' blurry, drive-by tourist's-eye-view of my city. In fact, it is a subject I myself have written about fairly regularly over the years (For example "Get Up, Stand Up..." from 2005) :

...
I love community meetings.

Doesn't matter what the topic is, the breakdown is always the same.

Experts with blueprints who tell you more than you’ll every want to know about whatever to subject might be.

Wanna know about berms, or beetles or the regs governing the signage, sidewalk-access and smoking restrictions at bistros? Go and ask.

Then there are the ramblers: the guys who do all 18 minutes of their own, personal Alice's Restaurant.

Then the business guys. Suited up and on the prowl for government sugar...and want to also be sure to tell the government to fuck off if anything that's being planned might bump up against their bottom line.

The ranters. Always amusing.

The fat guy with a sheaf of grubby paper who takes an hour to make it to the mike while the temperature seems to rise one degree every minute. Then he gets to the mike and rants about whatever the fuck happens to be romping through his mind at the moment.

Proving definitively that humans don't possess telepathic or telekinetic powers because if we did, Horton would have heard all us Whos’ mentally shouting, "Shut up. Shut Up. Please, Holy Mother of God, it's 170 degrees in here and why won't this asshole Shut The Fuck Up!"

Also his head didn't explode.

The Community Activists, for whom every forum is a Nail for their particular Hammer.

You always see it coming.

There's a few moments of frosting where they talk a little -- very little -- about the reason the meeting was called in the first place...then on to the Bitch List.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s often a valid Bitch List – or at least portions are – but every meeting is an occasion for telling whomever is gaveling the session that the neighborhoods are getting screwed. Whatever’s on the flyers – a dog park, a bond issue, bike trails or mosquito abatement – you’re going to hear 30 seconds of symbolic abatement chatter, and the rest is how they’re getting screwed in various ways by the allocation of government money, or gentrification, or The Man generally.

Then somebody rises to tell us that his cousin was arrested on totally trumped up charged. Didn't have anything else to say; just setting the record straight on that particular matter, in case we were interested.

Then there's the fragile, old woman that also take a long while to make it to the microphone, and then tells a story that breaks your heart. I remember one such woman who began her remarks at a large hearing with the Mayor present, "Your honor, your father and mine were both Sons of the City..."

Brought the fucking house down.

And for anybody who thinks that the Left is secular, Jebus-hatin’ monolith of queers and abortionists, you will hear more “Tell it!"’s at a community meeting and exactly as many “Amen”’s as you’re likely to hear in church on any given Sunday.

And I wouldn’t have any of it any other way.

It’s raw, pure, unstepped-on democracy, which is why I love it. It draws the committed and the “should be committed” both, and if you’re not used to them, committed people can make non-political, I-don’t-wanna-get-involved, day-to-day muggles feel very uncomfortable.

"Cause" people: They don't blink much, and you're either useful to them, an impediment, or furniture.
...

Government goes where the people push it, and absent the constant pressure (translation: bitching) any government will wander off into the weeds and start fucking with you and telling you what to do.

But your rights and freedoms don’t come from them; their freedom of motion comes from you. Its hard fucking work, and Big Money talks, but at the end of the day (sometimes a very long day) the government moves where we will it to move.

See the guy in the Rockwell painting of the “Freedom of Speech” above?

He’s nervous. Really nervous.

By his tan and his hands and his clothes, you can tell he’s a working man. Everyone around him is wearing a tie; his collar is open.

Those are his remarks there in his pocket, which he probably spent a long time writing out, tossing out, and then rewriting.

He probably told his family that tonight he’s gonna go down to the meetin’ and give those Big Guys what ‘fer.

His wife was probably very proud of her man; he can swing an ax or drive a dozer, but he’s never been too good with words. Maybe she helped him with his remarks; maybe he didn’t want his woman to see him struggling with something that he has trouble mastering.

His kids are bustin’ out loud proud of him. He’s been talking about what degenerate asswipes the politicians are for years (of course, he reserves the “degenerate asswipe” talk for the tool shed, or maybe the bar.) Now he’s really going to march down there and kick a little ass around.

Way to go Pop!

But now he’s there, in his laborer’s clothes, and all his neighbors are looking at him, and his wife and kids and the warm comfort of his home are across town.

He stands.

He grabs the pew in front of him for dear life; sinks his nails into the wood.

It’s something solid. Something real. He perhaps gains strength from hanging on to something hewn and boned and made straight and true by honest hands. This is something he understands in his skin.

This, and that come what may, he’s a goddamned American Citizen, and has every right in the world to be there, to stand, and to be heard.

When did we forget that?
...

Instead I would merely note two things.

First, however beloved and renowned Rahm Emanuel might have been in Mr. Brooks' D.C. social and political circles, back in Chicago he is still regarded as a carpet bagger. He has no natural constituency here, and when he went away to join the DLC Elite, he left behind no appreciable mark, or legacy, or footprints in the sands of Garfield Park Conservatory that he could in any way plausibly use to claim clear title to the status of a Favorite Son finally returning to the bosom of his home town.

He pulled no swords from stones here, and no Watery Tarts of Lake Michigan

threw him any Excaliburs.

Instead what Mr. Emanuel has going for him is an assload of money, direct, hard-wired connections to every million-watt insider/power-broker in the Democratic Party and, most importantly,

a tacit but unmissable nod from the Daley Machine. A formidable and very-probably unbeatable political armory to which he can now add Mr. Brooks' free, full-page political advertisement masquerading as a New York Times Op-Ed.

Second, what the Conservative Republican Mr. Brooks fails to mention, of course, is just exactly how Chicago -- the beating heart of the Democratic Party -- came to be the place he rhapsodizes about from the window of his car.

A subject to which I among many, many other have also devoted no small amount of attention over



the


years


but which the immortal Mike Royko wrote about better and longer than anyone ever, and which he etched in granite for the ages in "Boss" -- the undisputed all-time, powerhouse Bible of Chicago politics -- which should be subtitled "The Prince...With Laughs" and will no doubt be read 100 years now alongside Machiavelli's masterpiece.

Royko speaks:

(P. 77) Out of this vast amalgam of patronage, money, special interests, restrictive election laws and organizational disipline emerge a handful of candidates, and they are what it is supposed to be all about.

Most of them come up through the system, as Daley did, as doorbell ringers, working in the jobs their sponsors got for them, pushing the ward book, buying the tickets, doing the favors, holding the coats, opening the doors, putting in the fix, and inching their way up the organizational ladder, waiting for someone to die and the chance to go into the legislature, into the City Council, and maybe someday something bigger.
...

Only one other short exists, and it is part of the system of the Machine: nepotism. A Chicago Rip Van Winkle could awaken to the political news column and, reading the names, think that time had stood still.

Underneath the glossy skin of the New Daley Pinstripe Patronage Machine, the outline of the chassis of the Old Regime is still clearly visible and intact. Especially the nepotism. Hell, with Madigans and Strogers and Jacksons and Carotherses and Daleys and on and on still merrily begetting and entitling new generations of Madigans and Strogers and Jacksons and Carotherses and Daleys and on and on...and with Blagojeviches still able to betroth their way into power, privileged, impeachment and prison...Chicago/Illinois politics continues to resembles nothing so much as the dregs of inbred European royalty just before the collapse of their ossified Old World Order.

So how did Chicago manage to build such a pretty veneer full of the "updated housing stock" and "blunt conversation" Mr. Brooks notes so admiringly?

Part of the answer is years of budgetary boondogglery and shell gaming which, once the bid for the Olympics fell through (and with it, all the yummy-yummy infusions of cash and credit Da Mare had been counting on) all became focused on deferring the coming Fiscal Armageddon until after Richie Daley was safely out of town. Mr. Brooks conspicuously elides over this chapter of the story with one, quick sentence fragment ("...it suffers under one of the biggest debt loads in the country") because the "blunt" reality that Hizzoner managed his miracles the same way any junkie manages to have a long dope frolic without the money on-hand to pay for it -- by borrowing every nickle he could lay his hands on and hocking anything that wasn't nailed down (and quite a bit that was) -- interferes with Mr. Brooks' happy fairy tale.

Matt Taibbi describes the down-spiraling process here:

“America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia’s SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Here’s yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. ...

You know how you used to have a job, and a house, and a car, and a wife and a family, and there was food in the fridge — and now you’re six months into a drug habit and you’re carrying toasters and TVs out the front door every morning just to raise the cash to make it through that day? That’s where we are. While a lot of this book is about how American banks used bubble schemes to strip the last meat off the bones of America’s postwar golden years, the cruelest joke is that American banks now don’t even have the buying power needed to finish the job of stripping the country completely clean.

For that last stage we have to look overseas, to more cash-rich countries we now literally have to beg to take our national monuments off our hands at huge discounts, just so that our states don’t fall one by one in a domino rush of defaults and bankruptcies. In other words, we’re being colonized — of course it’s happening in a clever way, with very careful paperwork, so we have the option of pretending that it’s not actually happening, right up until the bitter end.”

A second part of the answer is that such simultaneous feats of municipal splendor and malfeasance are only possible because of the nature of the government Daley the First created and bequeathed to his son: a ruthlessly managed, one-party state ruled from the top by a single, corporate-friendly emperor.

Royko again explains:

(P. 96) "[Richard J. Daley] does not view the party and the city as being creatures apart. They are one: the Democratic party is the city, and Republicans and independents are simply misguided people who don't understand how things work. The party is the political voice of the city, and the city government is the machinery to activate their wishes.
...

"By remaining chairman, he would decide who ran for office, every office, permitting him to control the rise of any potential competition. It is no accident than in his fifteen years as chairman and mayor, not a single young political figure would rise through the party to a position of being his obvious successor. Good sturdy mediocrities would be the rule."

In other words, those glowing, glancing images of Chicago which Mr. Brooks extolled as he breezed through my city are the direct result of exactly the sort of autocratic, dynastic, one-party big-governmentism which Conservatives such as Mr. Brooks spend their professional careers decrying...

...but which they obviously deeply crave so long as they can march in its parades.

Funny old world.