Not even a month since Chicago welcomed its new mayor. I applauded, more or less, then turned my attention elsewhere, figuring: it’s honeymoon time. Let the man settle in. Get used to his new chair. Start facing the demands of running ... checking the stats ... what is still the nation’s third-largest city, with Houston not expected to pass Chicago for another 10 years.
Then Monday, when my back was turned, the mayor sticks the knife in. While kissing up to the latest crop of police officers, he announced:
“And let me make this emphatically clear: If you don’t live in Chicago, you don’t have a right to talk about the city of Chicago.”
Sez who? The brand-spanking-new, wet-from-the-womb mayor of America’s (for now) third-largest city? Bzzzzt. Oh, I’m sorry: Wrong. We do have the right. But no need to trust an auslander, with the shameful stain of suburbia upon him. Flip open my U.S. Constitution to the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”
Yes, the mayor of Chicago is not Congress. He’s far less. A local official. Don’t we have enough local officials who feel entitled to score cheap political points by telling others what they have the right to say, read, think? Is Chicago’s new mayor really springing out of the blocks to join that race? Govs. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, meet your new teammate, Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The sad thing is, I know what Johnson was trying to say. He’s sick of Chicago getting kicked from all directions by those whose closest connection to the city is watching “The Bear.” But the answer isn’t covering your ears and shouting “Stop it!” It’s called, “not caring.” My inbox fills every day with rage-addicted Floridians trying to lord the weekend shooting stats over me.
I don’t like it, but never suggested they don’t have the right to criticize. Of course they do.
You know who else was a big fan of dismissing those who didn’t grow up next door in Bridgeport? Rich Daley. You whispered to Daley that his fly is open and, without ever glancing down, he’d sputter about people living in the suburbs not knowing their place. Rich, may I introduce Brandon; Brandon, Rich. You two have a lot in common.
Doesn’t our current mayor realize that it’s often outsiders who both see a situation clearly and are free to speak?
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” with its stomach-churning descriptions of Chicago slaughterhouses, led to true change, despite a certain shortcoming of its author, who spent just seven weeks here researching his subject.
“People used to ask me afterward if I had not spent my whole life in Chicago,” Sinclair wrote in his autobiography, “and I answered, if I had done so, I could never have written ‘The Jungle.’ I would have taken for granted things that now hit me as a sudden blow.”
Now that I’ve spilled the beans, I hope you don’t make the public libraries pull their copies. They’ll have to yank “The Adventures of Augie March” too. A very Chicago book, in case you haven’t read it. Written by Saul Bellow, in Rome and Paris, London and New York. Everywhere but here.
“Not a single word was composed in Chicago,” Bellow said. They gave him the Nobel Prize in literature anyway. The Chicago Bulls also let Michael Jordan play, even though he lived in Highland Park. What did they know that you don’t?
I thought we were done with this. That we’d finally emerged from four years under the reign of the Queen of Unforced Error, Lori Lightfoot. Who said that for interviews marking her second anniversary in office, she didn’t want to talk to white reporters, when what she meant was she didn’t want to talk to certain reporters who might call out her BS. Et tu, Mayor Johnson?
Chicago needn’t tolerate being abused for fun by haters. Bigots around the country invoke its name the same way transphobes bring up high school swimming. It isn’t like they suddenly care about either. They’re just looking for the softest spot to stick their knife in.
But that doesn’t give you the right to malign all outsiders. Leave dismissing groups en masse to Republicans — they have more practice. Democrats know that a good idea can come from anywhere. Even from Northbrook.
