Black and White Mischief in Chicago
Valiunas, Algis
Algis Valiunas BLACK AND WHITE MISCHIEF IN CHICAGO Only lunatics can survive in this asylum. Wr he Republican Party killed 1. Robert Kennedy so they could raise the price of everything. It had...
...That he had been married and was the father of two children did not dispel the rumors...
...over the past five years or so, there has been a significant admixture of Mexicans and Arabs as well...
...Mayor Washington's administration, despite the magniloquent testimonials he regularly offered to its unexampled rectitude, conducted business to a disturbing degree in accordance wth time-honored local procedures...
...Members of a motorcycle gang ran a car with two black men inside off the road, beat the men, then set the car on fire...
...when it asserts that nothing is more important to the wellbeing of the black community than an uninterrupted succession of black men in the Office of the Mayor, this travesty of reform is the dream it seeks to keep alive...
...However, Cokely's malignity also tookin white people in general, Prince Charles and Princess Diana in particular ("the king and queen of the existence of a secret society"), and even Harold Washington, who had committed the unconscionable offense of commiserating with Jews after neo-Nazis had vandalized synagogues and Jewish-owned shops...
...However, the artist had every legal right to paint it and the School every right to put it on display...
...If you accept our invitation to become a Member of the Institute before December 1, 1988, you will receive in addition the USSI book, Central America and the Reagan Doctrine, edited by Walter F. Halm with an introduction by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick ($13.00 value...
...It is far easier to ignore a lunatic harangue when it has nothing to do with religion...
...Their getaway was pitiably short-lived...
...However, where whites' fears of blacks are concerned, the difficulty is more trying: everyone, black and white, already knows what it is that whites fear, and the trouble is getting blacks to acknowledge publicly that this fear—the fear of crime, especially of violent crime—is a well-justified one, and the principal obstacle to integration...
...Your tax-deductible contribution of $25 or more will help to support USSI's ongoing program of research and publication — plus the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping to promote the realistic and informed public discussion essential to national security in the late Twentieth Century...
...The aldermen hollered that the painting was "an incitement to riot" when in fact it was precisely their hollering that furnished the real incitement...
...On June 8, the City Council passed a Home Equity Assurance ordinance by a vote of 26-24...
...and it could be that the ethnic bomb vote will decide the next mayoral election...
...While the city'sschools enjoyed the distinction of being "the worst in the nation," in a condition "approaching meltdown," according to Secretary of Education William Bennett, members of the Board of Education saw to it that friends and relations received service contracts at more than generous rates...
...Although Hispanic gang activity in and around Marquette Park has yet to attain the standard of maniacal bloodletting it enjoys in its traditional preserves, things are unequivocally looking up...
...Martin Luther King, the neighborhood most notorious for such white racist thuggery has been Marquette Park...
...and it is unlikely that clarity will soon triumph on this point...
...It was a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...He promised that on his way home he would stop at his church and pray for her---!`not Hail Marys, but good old black spiritual prayers...
...Decency does not have much time here, and it will not get another chance...
...In Chicago these days, political hallucinations about murder committed for the sake of something so unoffensive, so clean as simple greed seem as innocuous and quaint as stories of leprechauns...
...What he will be remembered for is the spiritual instruction he offered, in lectures delivered between 1985 and 1987 and recorded for posterity, to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam...
...Evans is Sawyer's chief black rival...
...Not that Mayor Washington was venal himself...
...Equity assurance is a program that offers such an incentive...
...for certain of them, surely, it had been a moral necessity as well...
...The goal of home equity is to keep blacks from moving next to whites...
...Upon hearing about the painting, these black aldermen formed a posse, reinforced by police who were acting under the aldermen's direct orders, in an informal state of martial law...
...they have conducted scattered terrorist operations since...
...A middle-aged black woman alderman fumed, "Whites in Chicago never wanted to live next door to me or anyone who looks like me...
...Perhaps the most memorable image of the campaign was that of a wormy young man in that crowd chanting Epton's name over and over, his body shaking in a virtual convulsion of loathing for Washington, his expression of ecstatic fury the sort one expected to see in footage from the streets of Teheran rather than from those of one's hometown...
...The spectacle of public irrationality was overpowering, and one can readily see how blacks might have presumed that any reasoned opposition to their beloved leader was mere rationalization in the service of some dark, unthinking force...
...Most white Chicagoans now wish they could forget, and black Chicagoans will doubtless always remember, the mob that taunted and menaced Harold Washington outside a Catholic church on the Northwest Side during the campaign, when he arrived to attend Mass on Palm Sunday...
...One speaker did advise the audience to listen to a radio talk the next morning by Congressman Gus Savage, who would discuss the abrasiveness of relations between blacks and Jews...
...The man who had said, "Oh, shit," turned out to be a real estate lobbyist testifying on behalf of the NAACP, and he raved not only against the viciousness of home equity, but also against the integration management programs in Hyde Park, South Shore, and Beverly—almost the only integrated neighborhoods on the South Side...
...The students and the thieves exchanged insults, and there was a bit of a scuffle...
...A man a few doors down from her had his car stolen from in front of his house, and found it stripped in the black neighborhood a few blocks away, on the other side of Western Avenue...
...most years, one used to expect some 6,000 tainted votes...
...The faculty and administration of the School of the Art Institute abdicated their responsibility to judge whether a student's work might be morally despicable, reprehensible, or otherwise unworthy of display...
...The outcry about Nelson's First Amendment rights, he argued, contrasted sharply with the white silence about Cokely's: "This shows there is a dual standard...
...The thousands of Marquette Park residents who signed a statement deploring white racism and supporting open housing, the city never heard of...
...A perceived threat to its value—whether it be announcement of a methadone clinic or evidence of racial change—is enough to force them into trying to sell before the price goes too low...
...The recklessness of public discourse set the general tone...
...The aldermen had no legal right whatsoever to burst in and take the painting down...
...Rash, unthinking, blinded by moral pomposity, these avenging angels of righteousness made a signal contribution to the city's history of racial devilment...
...Education to alleviate racial fears is a salutary thing, and, correctly applied, might speed progress toward resolving the black gall bladder question or establishing just who the real Jews might be...
...Accused of dithering, Sawyer retorted that in fact he had judiciously given the matter the unhurried consideration it deserved and thus had demonstrated his "sensitivity" to the volatile feelings the Cokely business aroused in the black community...
...To keep owners from panic, we must remove that fear of diminishing value...
...Detractors have called the program "black insurance," because it is designed specifically to ease white homeowners' fears that their houses will depreciate in value when black people move into the neighborhood...
...strategic stakes in Central America and the broader implications of the evolving regional scenario...
...During the '83 mayoral campaign and the Council Wars that followed Washington's election, the smirking weasel antics of Washington's political opposition exerted an incalculable moral suasion...
...It is in the light of these circum- stances that one must view the racial controversy of the hour, rather less theatrical but far more momentous than the Cokely or Art Institute capers: the dispute over Home Equity Assurance...
...B. Herbert Martin, Mayor Washington's pastor and his appointee to the chairmanship of the Chicago Housing Authority, declared that Cokely's remarks had a "ring of truth" and that "sometimes the truth is inflammatory...
...lino days after Cokely's firing, at the regular Saturday morning meeting of Operation PUSH, one saw what black righteousness held in supreme regard, and what had to be sacrificed for its sake...
...The Cokely affair was the topic of discussion, and the first caller I heard was a man professing to substantiate Cokely's medical research...
...Surely most of the black people moving into Marquette Park are just the sort of folks most of the white people living there would be happy to have as neighbors and vice-versa...
...And rush a copy of Central America and the Reagan Doctrine...
...Serving the public good remained a convenient way of helping oneself, or one's own, to a choice selection of the goods...
...Black aldermen and witnesses against home equity foamed and fulminated in the name of decency and at least once for the sake of Jesus Himself...
...The campaign slogan of Washington's Republican rival, Bernard Epton—who had been a profoundly decent man, to that point in his career—was blunt as could be, and appalling as brain damage: "Epton...
...A learned colleague, Bobby Rush, presented a summary exegesis of the constitutional question...
...Had he condemned Martin, he would have lost far more, as Martin is a popular figure among respectable people...
...Concerted community action against incivility and crime—which will inevitably surge up in the newly integrated areas—is indispensable...
...in response, Mr...
...Although Washington's people had insisted on the most painstaking scrutiny for fraud during the 1983 elections, the Mayor avowed his incredulity that such abominations could come to pass under his regime...
...For the safety of daily life is no longer a matter of course in places like Marquette Park...
...One of the finest is Strategic Review, published by the United States Strategic Institute, not only because it focuses almost exclusively on the most compelling strategic problems of the day, but also for the quality of its writing, the pertinence of its articles, and the depth and clarity of the thinking displayed...
...In 1966 Marquette Park was still some distance from the black end of town, but the distance has narrowed markedly since then, as whites have fled before blacks' westward advance...
...However, the relation between reason and unreason in politics as in most any other human activity is almost never so straightforward...
...One could not but be fascinated, and I listened in for several nights...
...An investigation that Mayor Washington ordered into reports that aldermen and mayoral aides were on the take determined that the Mayor himself and certain staff members had discovered and then immediately covered up a deputy revenue commissioner's receipt of a $10,000 bribe...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 25...
...and well never, ever get it back...
...I said I am against everything [the Christian symbols] stand for...
...to do what it takes to run the drug dealers out...
...Between 1960 and 1980, the city lost over 200,000 middle class families, most of which lit out for the suburbs—many when their neighborhoods underwent the conversion from all-white to all-black...
...the wholesale surgical removal of healthy black wombs and gall bladders was the chosen means toward the systematic debilitation and eventual destruction of the race...
...Meanwhile, violent crime in the projects soared to new heights, and the new head of the CHA, Vincent Lane, recently alleged that some CHA managers are in cahoots with gang leaders...
...For decency's sake, the painting should not have been painted...
...The quiet voice of decency tends to get drowned out by the noisome racket of goonery amok, which invariably shrieks, and usually into a megaphone...
...Mayor Sawyertwisted every which way, in the sad invertebrate spasms of a worm on the hook, in his efforts to avoid having to fire Cokely...
...One would hardly be surprised if it were...
...Ill !! It advertised two houses for sale about a mile up the road, where blacks have not yet moved in...
...The haters, the crazies, the gang-bangers, the political opportunists: they're the ones who have the run of the place, and they like it that way...
...Had he simply cut Cokely loose from the start, he would have lost any hope of support among black Chicago's maniac contingent...
...Signature United States Strategic Institute 1625 I Street, N.W., Suite 1011, Washington, DC 20006 STRATEGIC REVIEW SUMMER 19811 UNITED STATES STRATEGIC INSTITUTE them...
...Such is the cost that whites are evidently expected to pay for integration...
...the state ordinance calls for another referendum this fall in all Chicago wards that petition to take part, and the petition drive has been so successful that twice as many homeowners are expected to participate as would have under the city ordinance...
...For some black politicians and activists, to denounce Cokely for all the city to hear a few days earlier had been a political necessity...
...A young woman settled the theological dispute, to her mind anyway, with terse finality: "The reason the Jews get in trouble is they are not the real Jews...
...For the benefit of the dazzled public, the aldermen proceeded to decipher their work and to explain its social implications...
...There is no question that decent Chicagoans of all races want pretty much the same things, chief among them being refuge from the criminal monstrosities of city living...
...Cokely was in need of some rest, or that black leadership was in a sorry state, the talk show hosts curtly dismissed, and other callers heatedly reviled...
...Call your friends and relatives today...
...The hallowed prerogatives of the old order—the sweetheart contracts for pals from way back, the payroll laden with brothers-in-law and political bunkmates—survived reform...
...Black power in Chicago has somehow acquired the undeserved moral lustre of black achievement, largely because acquiring power remains the principal black political achievement...
...Sometimes this town seems like no place for decent people...
...At any rate, in response to "Mirth and Girth," a gang of livid black aldermen enacted a masterwork of performance art that will linger in the city's consciousness for a long time...
...Steven Cokely, a thirty-sevenyear-old black man, was Mayor Eugene Sawyer's liaison to community organizations...
...The family was pointedly the black political family, not the celebrated rainbow coalition...
...and this unspoken understanding of his that such things ought not be done does him far more moral credit than anything he actually did say...
...When the crucifix-buster averred, "They have bombs they can drop that will kill only black people," the moderator—a million laughs, the English language—was roused to eloquence of his own: he had known about these "biological ethnic bombs" for ten or twelve years now, and he was doing what he could to spread the word, even though "people say this man is crazy...
...The home equity program will enable householders and resident owners of small apartment buildings to insure the current market value of their property...
...This alderman, Anna Langford, has been accused by a tenants' organization of being a slumlord...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 23 Southwest Side, and its residents have long been largely of Irish, Polish, and Lithuanian descent...
...Operation PUSH, which rose to national prominence as a black activist organization under the Reverend Mr...
...When a lot of people do that in a short period of time, panic sets in and values plummet...
...Another lady across the street was not so lucky: she had her arm broken by her black attacker...
...It had nothing to do with religion...
...Mayor Washington encouraged and endorsed the home equity proposal for over three years before lucidity struck him and he recanted...
...Their flagrant lawlessness set a fearsome precedent for goons of all colors...
...With the value of their houses secured, they will have one less reason to abandon the stritgle for decency...
...Incompetence, cronyism, and contempt for the law brought the Chicago Housing Authority to unprecedented financial ruin...
...When she said that, if these powerful groups had not lobbied so vociferously against home equity, some black aldermen would have supported it, an elderly black man sitting next to me in the visitors' gallery muttered, "Oh, shit...
...Savage's kinship with Cokely was evidently strong enough to overcome any differences between them: Cokely attended the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in Savage's company, wearing a badge that declared him the Congressman's "Honored Guest...
...to paint over graffiti, again and yet again...
...As it happened, they managed to incite only themselves and some preposterously agreeable policemen, then rioted...
...While the discussants' reflections regularly turned to eternal things, the conversation addressed secular affairs of moment with comparable thoughtfulness...
...A few months ago a young black man attacked this same lady, in the middle of the day, just outside her front door...
...Anything else—and there is plenty else, obviously—is peripheral...
...Since 1966, when volley after volley of rocks and bottles greeted a protest march for open housing led by the Reverend Dr...
...Decent black leaders will not denounce indecent black leaders because decent black folks need the haters on their side, at the polls...
...The alderman who actually tucked "Mirth and Girth" under his arm and hauled it away, Allan Streeter, possessed a connoisseur's expertise in the provenance of degenerate art, and knew just by looking at the picture that "the fellow who drew [it] is Jewish...
...When Cokely's remarks were published last May, many black people—though not many black leaders—found them indecent and said so...
...Lu Palmer, a longtime confidant of Harold Washington and a prime mover behind Washington's election as mayor, lauded Cokely as "a young man who has delved into knowledge like no one else I know...
...Strategic Review permits you to share in the strategy debates now underway at the highest levels of U.S...
...Disgusted by the Democratic party's betrayal, home equity supporters took to wearing buttons with the motto "Home Equity or Else" and a rendering of a dead donkey...
...To participate in the program, one must pay a fee of some $125 which covers appraisal and administrative costs...
...Perhaps they will not be turned out at all...
...Choose your neighbor...
...That's all I've got to say...
...Works of art far nastier than Nelson's cheesy daubing abound, under the law's full protection...
...Mayor Sawyer fired Cokely because he was an intolerable political liability, but Cokelyretained the legal right to say what he pleased...
...Influential spokespersons for racial justice informed Mr...
...only the beneficiaries changed...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 Therefore, maintaining the political solidarity of the black community—keeping intact the electoral monolith that gave Harold Washington 98 percent of the black vote—is worth sacrificing the amity between decent whites and blacks...
...A participating homeowner must continue to live in his house for five years and maintain the quality of his property...
...Saying that, after all, is really no more Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...About saying that, the speaker—another gentleman altogether now—surely meant...
...The singular moral piquancy of the Art Institute nonsense lay in the improbable concatenation of imbecilities that enabled events to attain escape velocity...
...Quite a few have already found the cost prohibitive, and have cleared out...
...Cokely's true vocation, of course, lay outside conventional politics...
...Over the past two years, blacks have begun to move into Marquette Park and similar neighborhoods nearby...
...The title of Nelson's portrait was "Mirth and Girth"—an allusion to "Girth and Mirth," which is the name of a lonelyhearts club for fat gay men...
...With the city abuzz about Cokely, one expected PUSH, which convened an impressive array of community leaders for this Mother's Day meeting, to issue a resounding declaration of its position on Cokely...
...How willing whites are to stay put and resist thepredators—to go out on patrol with neighborhood watch groups...
...That is why Secretary General Woerner chose Strategic Review for unveiling his important and controversial proposal for a NATO missile defense in 1986...
...Bone-through-the-nose black savagery became a not uncommon motif of casual political talk in private...
...Almost anywhere else, their outcry would have seemed an act of simple decency...
...Virtually no white families are moving into the neighborhood where I live, and there is a real danger that the neighborhood will simply be resegregated in time...
...Since 1983 Mayor Washington had been widely rumored to be homosexual...
...This man people say is crazy happened to be Lu Palmer...
...T o appreciate just what communi- 1 ty sentiments Mayor Sawyer was handling with such delicacy, one only had to spend some time listening to "On Target," a late night call-in talk show on the black-owned radio station WVON...
...When the Movement invokes the sainted memory of the late Mayor...
...She predicted that the hearing "will be nothing more than a kangaroo court...
...he was widely regarded as the anointed successor to Mayor Washington, and a demonstration in his support virtually surrounded City Hall the night of Sawyer's selection...
...Sawyer's loss would have been Alderman Timothy Evans's gain...
...A boy playing at art dashed off a trivial, thoughtless, repulsive, and badly painted picture, probably in the expectation of being esteemed for his audacity...
...Once painted, it should not have been hung...
...With excessive modesty, the aldermen left their piece untitled...
...Waxing ministerial, he brought the full weight of his sacred learning to bear on the troubling issues of the day: "Jesus Christ looked at Jews and said, 'You vipers, you snakes . . " Not all callers were so bountifully endowed with the Christian virtues: "We gonna have to bust down these crucifixes," one opined...
...Another black woman alderman insisted that whites' racial fears were founded in hateful illusion but that the City Council dealt strictly in reality: therefore, it could not pass the home equity ordinance...
...More and more drug dealing is being done, and violence is on the increase: there have already been a few gang murders, for the sake of commerce and of sport...
...While cracking down on panic-peddling by unscrupulous real estate brokers is essential to preserving neighborhood stability, something more is required: "an incentive to keep homeowners in their neighborhood...
...The eloquent proponent cited above is not a Chicago boy but a sometime lieutenant governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, writing in the New York Daily News on February 26, 1980, and advocating pilot home equity assurance programs in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Buffalo, and Rochester...
...The real subject of the painting was not transvestism, however, but rather homosexuality...
...Name Address City State Zip ^ My tax-deductible contribution of $25 is enclosed...
...the ordinance had languished in committee for a year, every one of the eighteen black aldermen in the Council voted against it, and Mayor Sawyer then vetoed it...
...Mayer, a Southwest Side housewife, is bright, well-spoken, customarily civil, and devoted to her cause, which she has spent fifteen years working for...
...Yet no black leader dares face this squarely...
...In the end he had to anyway...
...if he subsequently sells the house and is unable to realize its appraised market value, the home equity assurance will make good the difference...
...peanut-sized kids stand around on streetcorners flashing gangland semaphore, and serve as look-outs when drug dealing is done...
...As Jean-Jacques Rousseau discerned some time back, the identifying characteristic of the bourgeois man is his fear of violent death...
...A new morality inseparable from color had replaced morality indifferent to color as the hallmark of the Movement...
...Besides, one is downright grateful around here for outbursts of public dementia that everyone can immediately agree are insane...
...By accepting membership in the United States Strategic Institute, you will receive Strategic Review regularly and you can look forward to other timely analyses and background information —not readily available elsewhere — on vital national security issues...
...Whether or not Mayor Washington was homosexual, his biographers will someday inform us with greater certainty...
...Some of us can't walk with each other...
...A Baptist minister cried out in righteous anguish against the black community's taking part in "the crucifying of a black man...
...Home equity can help slow the bleeding that has already begun, but it will almost certainly be insufficient to stanch the wound altogether...
...Significantly, Evans and several other black aldermen faulted Sawyer for not getting rid of Cokely straightaway...
...She charged "a cabal of political interests both from within our city's government and without, intent on driving a wedge between the neighborhoods of our city," with "carrying out a deliberate campaign of misinformation and disinformation about this program...
...Jean Mayer, of the Save Our Neighborhood/Save Our Cities Coalition, opened the proceedings by launching a rhetorical poison gas attack of her own...
...he could be heard exercising that right on WVON, ranting about the Jews and promising his enemies that he would "get [his] justice in the streets . . ." The aldermen, too, found the streets the right place for it...
...Several black aldermen went along with Washington while he supported home equity, and denounced it as an outrage when he turned against it...
...The degree to which black convictions about white racism are correct is a measure of whites' blindness to the worst in themselves...
...Unfortunately, the leading spokesman for home equity, Mrs...
...An unsolicited mailing I recently received read, "Don't hesitate...
...tranquillity will have to be regained, and secured...
...Mayer opened herself and home equity to a barrage of righteous abuse—although one should add that Mrs...
...They are chiefly the work of two Hispanic street gangs, Ambrose and Two-Six, that infiltrated the area as families moved out this way from the gang-ridden Little Village, some five miles north...
...In July 1986, on the eve of a black protest march through Marquette Park, a policeman assigned to protect the marchers from neo-Nazis and other white racists who promised trouble told me that he deplored violence but that in this case it was a necessary evil: "If the Nazis don't stop the blacks coming in, nothing will...
...Jesse Jackson's mismanagement, remains the most authoritative community force in black Chicago...
...One of the first scandals to hit the administration was the discovery that one such beneficiary and a leading adviser to the Mayor, Clarence McClain, was a sometime pimp...
...these combined forces entered the gallery where the painting was on display, took the painting off the wall, and walked off with it, through a gauntlet of yelping art students...
...They burned a cross on a woman schoolteacher's lawn...
...Once a refuge from this kind of criminality, Marquette Park is becoming a stomping ground for it...
...Savage began by calling Cokely's AIDS-injection allegations "ridiculous," but then went on very much in the Cokely vein to accuse Jews and Asians of predatory business practices in the black community...
...he was certainly a nuisance, and possibly a menace...
...Home equity will at least assure those who are willing to endure such trials that they will not in the end pay a financial penalty for doing so...
...There was plenty to follow...
...Cuomo's swift, statesmanlike reconsideration of the matter set a trend...
...Martin presently protested, and Mayor Sawyer promptly agreed, that a reporter for the Chicago Tribune had in fact misconstrued Martin's statement...
...Everyone who had the opportunity to do something stupid did it...
...There is an awful poignancy to the plight of these decent people, for decency is embattled, and pretty nearly surrounded, with no hope that reinforcements will arrive in time...
...The state legislature, however, proceeded to pass a bill of its own that effectively overrode the Mayor's veto...
...The Reverend Mr...
...The implication of what was said at PUSH that day was undeniable: no white mayor will do so well by black people as any black mayor will...
...Which is a discreet way of saying—not that anyone in these parts has bothered much with civility for some time now—when it has nothing to do with race...
...national security policy-making and to enjoy the most authoritative assessments available of the military, political, diplomatic and economic challenges confronting the United States and its allies...
...Perfectly nice white people in some parts of town have long counted on mob action or guerrilla raids by vicious toughs to dissuade blacks from attempting to integrate white strongholds...
...Provoked by the vilification she had endured silently during another meeting on home equity a few days before, she lit into the "self-serving, self-interested pin-striped bigots" who represented various civil rights and realty organizations and who had maligned home equity as old-fashioned white racism under a new guise...
...probably a good number of these families moved precisely in order to escape the gang violence there...
...that he had been engaged, at the time of his death, to a schoolteacher for over a decade only seemed to encourage them...
...She managed to get inside the house...
...The error is a grave one...
...Please bill me...
...Nothing has changed...
...I was one of three or four whites in a gathering of perhaps five hundred people...
...Race-crazed goons unquestionably come in all colors...
...But to return to the saying that, about doctors' spreading AIDS: the question of its outrageousness must be taken in context, as the saying goes...
...in this case, however, the orator was resting comfortably in what might be considered the city's foremost institution: the Office of the Mayor...
...when it demands that his legacy pass down the generations into the radiant future...
...There is also no question that decent people of every race are ready to acknowledge the decency of decent people of every other race—although to be certified among the decent usually does take some time, while one's credentials are inspected with a wary eye...
...I served notice on the cross...
...Before it is too late...
...This was not politics as usual...
...Mayer's remarks clearly did far more to inflame her opponents' righteousness than to sharpen their abuse, which they had been honing for some time...
...Senator Paul Simon—not the pride of Chicago exactly, but arguably one of the biggest things to come out of Makanda, Illinois in the past few years—advocated the Chicago home equity plan as a model for Ate entire country, then reversed himself just before this year's Illinois presidential primary...
...The art was bad art, the speech had been better left unspoken, and the thuggery was the doing of aldermen and police...
...The man was obviously crazy as could be...
...And that struggle may well bring decent whites and blacks together as they have never been before—not even in the glory days of the civil rights movement...
...I have lived in Marquette Park for 1 the past five years...
...In the jokes investment bankers told, as in the stray remarks of guys manning gas pumps, one caught a whiff of something unclean...
...This is what's floating around the black community...
...white trash psychopaths have met some of their new neighbors with violent resistance...
...No one so much as mentioned his name...
...For about the past ten years, Marquette Park has been one of the racial borderlands immediately west of Western Avenue, a street which runs the length of the city and which has served as the most recent line of demarcation between the black South Side and the white Southwest Side...
...We know...
...And to attain so worthy an end, decency must accommodate itself to thuggery...
...and during the past two years, as blacks and Hispanics have moved in, the very things that people feared all along would happen have happened...
...Mayer graciously assured him that she would pray for him, too...
...With an air of hyper-rationality, he described the conspiracy among white doctors to compromise the immune systems of black people by depleting their natural melanin supplies...
...And the tacit alliance of decency with foulness is by no means a strictly black phenomenon...
...they released it the next day, presumably upon its own recognizance, and with a six-inch gash in it...
...Toward the meeting's end, the keynote speaker, a woman lawyer, declared, "We are more divided today than we've been for a long time...
...They decided it was time to move on when a teenaged boy was stabbed to death on the sidewalk in front of their house...
...however, many black homeowners are seeking to extend home equity to black neighborhoods...
...Mayer...
...The foregoing is the professional judgment of Harry Zubkoff, Editor of Defense Media Review (June 12, 1987...
...Similar testimonials have come from academicians, journalists, legislators, policy-makers...
...This spokesman for the communal reason—a former Black Panther leader who dispersed revolutionary literature under cover of the First Amendment during the 1960s—overlooked the fact that no one had denied Cokely's right to propagate his envenomed fantasies...
...One ofmy neighbors, an elderly woman, moved here with her family seven years ago from the Back of the Yards, where Hispanic gang-banging—it refers to shooting in these parts, not to rape—is a regular feature of neighborhood life...
...In this volume 15 experts direct a hard light on U.S...
...They will not be turned out overnight...
...This confusion has the potential to be the city's downfall...
...Another hemorrhage of comparable magnitude would be fatal to the city...
...nevertheless, he repaid Council supporters with chairmanships of unnecessary committees that almost never met, that accomplished nothing, and that commanded large budgets for the employment of helpful chums and the purchase of extravagant perquisites...
...in which case the city will perish...
...The silence was a purposeful one, and the reason for it was transparent...
...Now demonstratively to maintain silence on the subject, in the bosom of the black family, was the overriding necessity...
...USSI is an independent, nonprofit organization...
...to cover the remaining cost of the program, every taxpayer in the participating wards will be assessed an estimated $8 to $25 a year, whether or not he decides to insure his own property...
...Others thought different, or at best did not know just what to think, at least for public consumption...
...Manfred Woerner, Secretary General of NATO, singles out Strategic Review for "its embracive, universal view of strategy, and its focus on the global interplay of political, economic, social and military factors...
...Seeing white malice at its ugliest, more blatant than at any other time in recent memory, many black Chicagoans must have thought the worst: that race hatred, pure and simple, was the ultimate motive force behind the political opposition of the white old guard...
...In the Chicago tradition of extending the franchise to those denied it elsewhere—most notably, of course, to dead people, but also to some who have never actually been alive—an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1987 mayoral primary, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and Election Watch '87, an independent watchdog organization...
...One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle-class residential neighborhoods...
...An alderman compared Mrs...
...The degree to which black convictions about white racism are correct is a measure of whites' blindness to the worst in themselves...
...but thuggery is nevertheless what it was...
...Marquette Park is a blue-collar neighborhood on the The case for Home Equity Assurance has been made boldly, lucidly, with telling force...
...Elevated to the Office of the Mayor largely on the shoulders of the white aldermen who had been Mayor Washington's dogged opponents, Sawyer is unsure of his standing among blacks...
...The Mayor denounced City Council committee patronage as a "cesspool," and introduced a bill for the Council's reform...
...When things got serious, he cowered out of sight, refusing to show his face in town...
...but the undeniable effect of his vaunted reforms was the redistribution of the official swag along racial lines and among a select few...
...And then the Park will be gone...
...Yetanother admired this statement so much that she repeated it almost verbatim, including the stirring peroration, "If it's racial fears we're talking about, then we need to educate, educate, educate...
...Gang graffiti are everywhere, on walls, garage doors, stop signs...
...To that end, real estate panic peddlers are eagerly pursuing their despicable trade, so far as the law will allow, and sometimes beyond...
...The city ordinance was to establish home equity pilot programs in certainwards on the Southwest and Northwest Sides of the city—areas predominantly white, Marquette Park among them—that supported these programs by a vote of over 90 percent in a special referendum last year...
...chuckleheadedness reigned, all the way around...
...Mayer's statement to the sort of thing one heard from "George Wallace in the 1950s .. . spewing that kind of rhetoric and hate...
...Although the inspiration for such evildoing doubtless came principally from within—something like an insect swarm buzzing deep in the skull, or the voice of a neighbor's dog issuing murderous commands—one probably would have heard as well, had one been able to monitor this beastly cacophony, the hissing and snarling of familiar public voices...
...The actual doing that, he evidently disapproved of, even if he didn't come right out and say so...
...Gang recruitment is increasingly successful...
...This necessity decreed that what those who denounced Cokely—and some were in attendance at PUSH—and those who revered him had in common, their blackness, was far more significant than what separated them, their understanding of right and wrong...
...in proportion, in relative potency, reason and unreason undergo continuous alteration, while both individuals and crowds tend to remain dauntingly confident that they are doing the reasonable thing, whatever that might be...
...Once uncorked, the noxious vapors pervadedthe town...
...to put themselves in danger by simply stepping outside their doors—when it is easy enough to find some pleasant haven outside the city, will ultimately determine the future of integration in places like Marquette Park...
...The welts that popped up on some prominent Chicago foreheads were evidence that, within, wrong-thinking minds had been set right...
...The brutes and moral imbeciles are indispensable to the triumph of justice, which can be achieved only by establishing the Office of the Mayor as a black preserve...
...In Chicago, these things are rarely so simple...
...Mrs...
...Ordinarily, hearing such remarks would move one to dismay at the awful plight of raving paranoiacs recently deinstitutionalized...
...The cynosure of this year's private exhibition of graduating students' work at the School of the Art Institute was David K. Nelson's revealing portrait of the late Mayor in ladies' underwear of a particularly unflattering cut...
...Elevating pig ignorance to the nobler status of imbecility militant, Cokely ranted mostly about "the Jew" and the plan of his conniving tribe "to one day reign forever...
...Dispensing with restraint, Mrs...
...the City Council chose Alderman Sawyer to replace the late Mayor Harold Washington last December...
...Another alderman hoped aloud for divine intercession: "God have mercy on the likes of Mrs...
...Cuomo slapped himself hard on the forehead, as Moe used to do when his unruly alter-ego, Curly, was guilty of some especially egregious stupidity...
...The School of the Art Institute awarded first prize in this year's student exhibition to a video about lesbians in a convent...
...when her attacker tried to break in, she sicked her dog on him, and he fled...
...The AIDS epidemic is a result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject the AIDS virus in the blacks . . . . Now what's so outrageous and extremist about that...
...The personnel director of the Chicago Transit Authority recently resigned amid charges that for the past three years most new CTA employees have been chosen from four black wards on the South Side...
...The cynicism of Mayor Sawyer's protracted indecisiveness about Cokely, and of his swift exculpation of Martin, was of a familiar sort: it was politics as usual...
...Declaiming at midday on the corner of State and Monroe, in the teeming Loop, the speaker was scrungy, buffalo-bearded, and ablaze with visionary fires...
...His full-throated rallying cry, however, turned by and by into a whimper ofretreat...
...Cokely had been a member of Sawyer's aldermanic staff since 1985...
...The case for home equity assurance The been made boldly, lucidly, with telling force: "The city . . . is involved in a fight for its life...
...MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION FORM Please enroll me as a member of the United States Strategic Institute for one year entitling me to receive quarterly issues of Strategic Review and a 40% discount on USSI publications commissioned by the Institute...
...If the city is to survive, then decency must become outspoken, forceful, bold, as mania, greed, hypocrisy, and racist thuggery, whether in bedsheets or in white shirts and bow ties, have always been...
...Matters are vastly more complicated and vexing when one man's maniac is another's messiah...
...She told Alderman 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 Timothy Evans, chairman of the Finance Committee, that by his recent observation that home equity "was not based on reality," he had "forfeited whatever reputation for fairness and justice [he had had] in [white] neighborhoods...
...If the toxicity of strident malice were measurable by scientific means, the City Council chamber during the Finance Committee's final meeting on the subject would have been declared a lethal hazard, sealed shut, and transported under cover of darkness to the depths of New Jersey...
...We know...
...Cuomo that his kind of thinking placed him decisively on the wrong side of history...
...They firebombed several houses...
...Black unity was the rallying cry...
...To many neighborhood people their house is their greatest asset...
...I n the name of what is pure, and in 1 defense of the sainted memory, thuggery won a stunning triumph last May over art and freedom of speech...
...The brutes were insufficiently brutish that day, and failed to hold the line...
...Black decency has cut its deal with foulness for the sake of power, in the belief—or at any rate, under cover of the profession—that only black power can ensure civic virtue...
...Early in the meeting, a speaker warned that, if two black men and one white man were to run in the next election for mayor, the white man would be certain to win: ". . . the Fifth Floor [of City Hall, where the Office of the Mayor is located], is going to be gone...
...The degree to which such black certainties are wrong is a measure of blacks' blindness to the worst in their own community...
...The black people who called WVON to suggest that Mr...
...There is grave peril here that most of the city would prefer to ignore, and home equity is an essential measure of prudence conceived to forestall a civic emergency...
...A state legislator (and former realtor and real estate lobbyist) thundered that home equity had genocidal implications: "Everyone talks about the Holocaust," and the Nazis "started [the Final Solution] off by recognizing Jews as a threat...
...outrageous than saying this: "I tacked [my repudiation of Christianity] on the cross and served notice that white supremacy and the symbols of white supremacy have been ruled off limits for people of African heritage...
...A more ecumenically minded participant contended that black people had a lot to learn from the Jews and could benefit enormously by emulating them: "Copy everything they do and do it right to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 21 SHARE IN TODAY'S BEST THINKING ON THE STATE OF OUR NATIONAL SECURITY "A very important element of the media for professionals and laymen alike who want to keep abreast of national security affairs is the quarterly journal...
...the leading cause of death among young black men in America is murder, almost always at the hands of other young black men: and there is the heart of the matter...
...Several people spoke at the meeting, and not one said a word about Cokely...
...Yet the form his madness took was somehow comforting nevertheless, though not of course to him...
...The police wound up taking the picture into custody...
...Such a work as theirs deserves the dignity of a lasting name: say, "Sodomy and Lobotomy...
...And it did precisely that, in an uncharacteristically quiet way...
...Some of us can't talk to each other...
...the mayor then vowed to proceed with his nomination of Martin to the chairmanship of the city's Commission for Human Relations...
...Chicago's black leadership mustered the formidable legions of exercised righteousness against the menacing inequity of home equity...
...With eloquent vehemence she implored, "Keep the family together...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
