Snow Daze....A pictorial dispatch from Chicago.

Or, anyway, from the portion of my neighborhood, beyond which I dared not travel. These photos were taken several hours after the onslaught of snow finally ceased. Some people were able to dig their cars out from underneath iced-over slabs of snow. Others weren't so lucky.

The thing about this snowstorm was not its magnitude per se, but rather its severity. Huge amounts of precipitation and wickedly strong wind gusts were concentrated within a disconcertingly brief span of time. As a result, the school day was canceled in both the private and public schools across the city. This might not seem so out of the ordinary, but apparently, today was Chicago Public Schools' first declared 'snow day' in 12 years(!).

It's said that this long streak of eschewing weather-induced school cancellations has been a point of pride among CPS officials, which is actually admirable considering the fact that so many poor children depend upon the schools for vital services that are frequently unavailable to them at home (including breakfast and lunch). But road conditions have continued to be so bad today that it would have been genuinely irresponsible for the administrators not to have called off school. They've also called off school for tomorrow, February 3rd, which is also more than merely the prudent option.

If you want to know how dangerous the roads still are in this city, consider that Lake Shore Drive—Chicago's bustling thoroughfare that races alongside the coast of Lake Michigan—had to be closed to traffic yesterday and, as I type, has not yet been reopened(!). Not only that, but apparently, there are still hundreds of abandoned cars stuck in the snow in the middle of this four-to-six-lane highway.

Nothing to do on a day like this except take photographs. And post them on one's normally horribly neglected blog. And tomorrow's going to be more of the same.

Nursing My Champagne Hangover...

What a time to find oneself living in Chicago.

J and I were varying degrees of sick with colds yesterday and therefore didn't venture down to Grant Park for the festivities. But nestled within the cozy confines of our humble Hyde Park digs, the city's excitement -- and reverence and awe -- was palpable. Of course, despite our colds, we just had to celebrate with a bottle of bubbly. Celebrations, cheers, cars horns honking and/or being honked lulled us to our slumber, our disbelief at what had happened still intact.

Today, the commute to work. Chicago's spirit of neighborliness and goodwill continues to pervade in the fuzzy Indian summer sun. On the bus and on the streets, back in Hyde Park and in the Loop, in the areas surrounding Grant Park. Faces speak volumes: a brand new text or a dusty text long forgotten. Where there was awe, there is now relief, a kind of basking in the moment's sunshiny serenity. Yes, it's really true; the albatross is off our back.

For one night, the City of Chicago was the focal point of the world's attention. Part of President-Elect* Obama's genius is that the focal point really was an entire city -- and, by extension, an entire nation and an entire world -- and not Obama himself. I mean, okay, obviously he was the figure of interest on the occasion of his acceptance speech. However: each and every one of Obama's communicative faculties, his body language, the content and music and resonances of his language and of his ideas, every power he summoned in the course of that speech was engaged in absorbing the enthusiasm of the entire, breathless City of Chicago, feeding this enthusiasm through his brilliant, tired mind, and returning the same enthusiasm, refashioned with elegance, finesse and sincerity.

This, by the way, is one of the most important of the myriad differences between Barack Obama and John McCain: for all of his confidence and even cockiness, Obama speaks with greatest authority about the American people and the future of this country.

By contrast, throughout his rambling, mean-spirited and at times pathetic campaign, McCain was able to speak with authority about one thing and one thing alone: John McCain.


______________
* You have to keep saying it to remind yourself that it's really true.

Voting for Obama as the First Act in a Long Struggle

If there's any issue on which there's near-consensus among Obama's and younger generations, it's that the rights and privileges of citizenship are meaningless unless they are claimed by the citizens. American political discourse (both local and national) has, since the so-called "Reagan revolution," consisted in the main of the systematic instrumentalization of political power to the designs of economic power. This instrumentalization has occurred on every front imaginable: infrastructural, ideological, cultural and psychological. To vote for Barack Obama today is to acknowledge the necessity of reclaiming this political process for the people. It is at once an act of enormous consequence and an act whose promise will only be fulfilled if (and to the extent that) we mean what we're saying.

Barack & Michelle voted this morning in their & my neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago.

If Obama wins the presidency today, it represents the declared reclamation of the ownership of the political process on the part of the nation's citizens. We -- the citizens -- declare our intention to reclaim our citizenship. Simple as that. It's a cause for celebration, and I will breathe a sigh of relief if and when Obama gives his victory speech tonight in Chicago's Grant Park.

It's important for us to remember what this declaration signifies. It doesn't mean that we've bequeathed the power to invent and pursue policy to a unilateral Obama Plan. It also doesn't mean that the wreckage that has been made of our infrastructure and political process is going to be swept away all in one fell....erm....swoop. Most importantly: it doesn't mean that we ourselves no longer bear the scars of a broken meritocratic, Cold War, my-country-right-or-wrong ideal. Our subconscious is littered with the remnants and curios of the past 30 and 50 years of narrow ideological bullshit. Embedded in our very conceptions of self are innumerable contradictions that will at times be painful and at times liberating to work at resolving.

The first step is to recognize it for what it is: to overcome the fear of seeing the shambles for what is. The second step is to declare our intention to repair what's broken.

That's what your vote for Obama means. It's no small thing, but neither is it an end in itself.

Go vote. Paddy, I'm talking to you.

Why Obama's campaign is justified -- morally & tactically -- in bringing up McCain & Keating Five.(That is...in my opinion.)

Despite the fact that by its very nature, it contradicts Obama's asserted platform that shuns 'negative' campaigning, here's why I believe Obama is justified, both morally and tactically, in presenting this documentary and information to the voting public:

The McCain campaign, particularly in the form of Sarah Palin's memorized talking points, has been unrelenting in the outright mendacity, slander and lies lies lies -- not to mention tons of coded racism -- of its outrageous and ridiculous attacks against Obama for his supposed connection to "terrorist" Bill Ayers: which is just downright disingenuous and everybody knows it. The McCain camp knows it's a lie too, but they have claimed time and again that they 'have no choice' but to continue spreading lies. You do too have a choice, Senator. You could save all of us a lot of headache and take a cue from your recent decision with respect to Michigan: withdraw your cranky-old-racist-asshole operation from other swing states. How 'bout it?

We've seen this kind of irresponsible and deeply dishonest activity from the McCain campaign so much over the last few months, that it has become difficult and tiring at times to bother to care. But we have to care and respond, just as Obama must care, and Obama must respond, even to the kinds of lies and tactics whose coarseness and spuriousness would -- in the company of civilized adults (that is, company in which the likes of McCain and especially Sarah Palin would be fish out of water, to be extra-generous) -- represent the kind of 'discourse' that one does not glorify with a response.

Think I'm exaggerating the level of desperation and dishonestly being perpetrated by Palin and McCain? (Of course you don't, unless you've been living under a rock...) Here's some objective proof for you, from Bloomberg News:

Over the weekend, McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, repeatedly linked the Democratic presidential candidate with a domestic terrorist group from the 1970s, telling supporters Obama used to ``pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' a reference to his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground group that carried out a series of bombings in the early 1970s. Obama served on a charity board with Ayers and has denounced the bombings.

Obama ``is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' Palin, 44, told donors at a fundraiser Oct. 4 in Costa Mesa, California. ``This, ladies and gentleman, is not the kind of change that I think we should be believing in.'' McCain adviser Greg Strimple said last week that they were "looking for a very aggressive last 30 days.''

"We're looking to turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's liberal, aggressively liberal, record and how he will be too risky for the Americans,'' Strimple told reporters on an Oct. 2 conference call.

So, as this McCain-minion Greg Strimple -- even his fucking name sounds shady -- points out: this is a strategy of out-and-out "aggression." Translation: McCain's filthy campaign wants now to play even filthier. And what that means is not an "aggressive last 30 days," but, rather: '30 days of LIES'. Even when it's stated in Strimple's simple-minded, Orwellian PR terminology, that's an awfully weird thing for a campaign to be admitting out loud, isn't it? Why not just say that McCain's going to endorse a liberalization of federal, state and local prohibitions on lynching.

This fucking Ayers bullshit just gets my goat, man. It is SO dishonest, I can barely believe that self-respecting journalists and politicos -- even those on the far, far Right, can sleep at night after spending a day repeating and spreading these lies and trying cast it as somehow credible. (Which is a difficult feat to pull off when you have zero credibility.) Whatever the details of his life as a young man, in the midst of the politically toxic and contentious political climate in the 60s and 70s, as a younger man -- during which time Obama was EIGHT YEARS OLD and nowhere near Chicago!! -- , William Ayers is a fucking Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. How Establishment can you get? Plus, he does good scholarship and, with his wife Bernadine Dohrn -- a law professor at Northwestern University -- is active in fighting poverty and working to combat racial and economic injustices.

The Ayers thing pisses me of for personal reasons, as well as the obvious moral, intellectual and political reasons. First, because I -- that's ME, y'all, along with my lovely wife and our two cats -- am a resident of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. I don't live in the same section of town as Ayers, which is an area with nice houses -- some of them truly posh, but the majority of them just everyday nice houses -- in which lots and lots of professionals and academics live with their families.

A number of these professionals and academics are connected to, in some way or another, the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Hospital, institutions which are, of course, located in Hyde Park. Many of the residents of the neighborhood are not connected to the University of Chicago, and simply live there because it's a nice neighborhood in which to live, or because it's got the kinds of houses that many people looking for houses are looking for. I shouldn't have to add that this place is NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION some kind of hotbed of radicalism. I've met some of the people who live there, and I've read the books of others. It is as close to the ESTABLISHMENT as you're likely to find. Trust me.

And, as if that wasn't enough, have people forgotten that the University of Chicago is the home of the Chicago School of economics, whose figurehead and intellectual architect was none other than the most influential proponent of extreme laissez faire economics that this country has ever seen? The Milton Friedman in whose name a shiny new economics/business-school building is soon to be erected on the University of Chicago campus as an enduring and no-doubt-well-funded monument to the conservative movement that gave us the Reagan Revolution, the Bush Administration(s) and with them, the Iraq War, the privatization of public infrastructure, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina, and the recent crash of the stock- and credit markets, which might ultimately usher in a SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION?? Nobody's gonna tell me that my neighborhood is some kind of hotbed of crazy radicalism. If it is, then man, nobody's inviting me to the party, because I sure don't see it anywhere.

Here's Thomas Frank -- former longtime resident of Hyde Park --, back on August 20, 2008, in his column in The Wall Street Journal, describing the soon-to-be constructed Milton Friedman Society. And here's Frank in that same column, on August 16, talking about the cynical, mendacious Republican ploy of portraying Hyde Park as an 'elitist' neighborhood, which..... I mean that's just prima facie the most ridiculous notion. For one thing, as I mentioned previously, I live in fucking Hyde Park.

I am way way way too poor to be an elitist.

But beyond that, the idea of Hyde Park as an elitist neighborhood in preposterous if you compare it to the real elite neighborhoods of Chicago. You want ELITE? Try Chicago's exclusive northern suburbs: Evanston, Glenview, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Hoffman Estates; try western suburbs like: Oak Park, Naperville, try old money urban districts like the Gold Coast, and continue by considering the skyrocketing cost of living in the recently gentrified and continually gentrifying neighborhoods of River West, parts of Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Logan Square, Lakeview, Andersonville, the South Loop.....I could go on, but I think maybe my point is kinda clear, at least?

Hyde Park is to be distinguished from most of Chicago's opulent/posh/trendy neighborhoods not by reference to its supposed 'elitism', but precisely by its comparative diversity: economically, racially, generationally/agewise and according to whatever metric of class, background, or level of education you can throw at it. It includes, over on 53rd Street, a commercial center that has historically and continues to be associated with the black professional class. Oh, by the way, in and around Hyde Park reside members of the South Side's increasingly large black professional class.

In contradistinction to the many posh neighborhoods I cited above, gentrification in Hyde Park is fairly marginal, to the extent that it could really be said to exist at all. I mean, it's not an 'opulent' place: when Hyde Park's lone, solitary grocery store -- one of the oldest (and most mis-managed [although I feel like a jerk pointing it out!]) food co-ops in the country -- went out of business last year, the entire neighborhood was left high and dry (that is to say, we had no grocery store anywhere nearby) for a matter of months -- as many as four or five, if memory serves -- before a replacement owner moved in and set up shop.

It's tempting for some to say that if you've ever been to a typical college neighborhood, you've been to Hyde Park. But that isn't quite right. Hyde Park is a much more down-to-earth, more diverse and more FRIENDLY place than most college neighborhoods. There is a spirit of goodwill here, and almost none of the stuffy elitism that one notices immediately upon entering -- for instance, Evanston, Illionois -- which is the wealthy suburb far to the north along Chicago's endless lakefront, on the other side of town, where Northwestern University is located.

In closing, I leave you with the words of an acquaintance of both Obama and Ayers, and additionally a colleague of the latter, in his former capacity as a high-profile administrator at University of Illinois at Chicago: Stanley Fish. Fish, who served as Dean of UIC's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2004, is a man whose politics I would describe as conservative. He's really a bit of a contrarian, in that self-satisfied, Socratic-method, law-school-professor-way. In his scholarship on law, he is just a bit too close to Antonin Scalia for comfort.

These quirks notwithstanding, he is and has always been an intellectually honest man. And so, Stanley Fish's take on this whole Ayers thing -- as published in his column on The New York Times Web site on April 27, 2008, in reference to the use of these 'Ayers-connection' fabrications and innuendo by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the primaries --, is eloquent and convincing. In my opinion, Fish is absolutely correct in his characterization of this sleazy political tactic as a new form of "McCarthyism."

Or more specifically, Fish says: "'McCarthyism' and 'Swiftboating' have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized." Fish's response to this 'shocking' revelation, particularly in light of his own professional and regional encounters with Obama and Ayers, should, in my view, be considered definitive. I quote at great length in the hope of demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt (I'm particularly fond of Fish's reference to the fact that the ultraconservative Judge Richard Posner is also among Ayers's neighbors):

Confession time. I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of llinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

Indeed in all the time I spent with Ayers and Dohrn, politics — present or past — never came up.

What did come up? To answer that question I have to introduce a word and concept that is somewhat out of fashion: the salon. A salon is a gathering in a private home where men and women from various walks of life engage in conversation about any number of things, including literature, business, fashion, films, education and philosophy. Ayers and Dohrn did not call their gatherings salons, but that’s what they were; large dinner parties (maybe 12-15), with guests coming and going, one conversation leading to another, no rules or obligations, except the obligation to be interesting and interested.

The only thing I don’t remember was ideology, although since this was all going on in Hyde Park, there was the general and diffused ideology, vaguely liberal, that usually hangs over a university town.

Many of those attending these occasions no doubt knew something about their hosts’ past, but the matter was never discussed and why should it have been? We were there not because of what Ayers and Dohrn had done 40 years ago, but because of what they were doing at the moment.

Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”

Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood. Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was accurate and continues to be so.

As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia (most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of deliberate duplicity.

But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold headlines proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.

As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in, and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.

The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt. (Link to article.)

No need to add anything to Fish's comments. Case dismissed.

Well, let me add two things. First: whereas the Palin/McCain/Bush/GOP tactic is nothing but slander and innuendo, Obama's calling out of McCain on his role in the Keating Five scandal pertains directly to McCain's claims that he is somehow a pro-regulatory/pro-oversight force with respect to economic questions. I mean, everybody knows McCain's claims are bullshit anyway, but I think Obama does well to fight back against an attack that's wholly devoid of substance with a counterattack that couldn't be more relevant to our current economic/regulatory situation.

Second, and final (and I haven't seen anyone else put it this way): in a way, the Right's childish, bullshit attack against Obama is worse than McCarthyism and worse than Swiftboating.

Why?

Because in essence, McCain's shameless tactic, were it successful -- which there's ZERO possibility of it being, in anything more than maybe a fund-raising sense among LOONY right-wingers -- would ultimately discourage anyone who has lived an actual life, outside of the beach houses and summer houses and ranches and country-clubs of a tiny elite. I live in fucking Hyde Park, and unlike McCain, I don't really have the luxury of choosing not to live here, even if -- let's say -- I disliked so vigorously the ideas of the Chicago School of economics that it caused a strain on me psychlogically to be so near such rightist ideology. Let's say I just hated the idea of buying my fruit and mil in the same grocery store as a Friedman-acolyte, SO MUCH SO that I wanted to move up north to Andersonville, just to avoid association, and thereby, guilt by association.

Guess what? Unlike George W. Bush, who could just move back to the family compound, and unlike John McCain, who can nestle himself comfortably underneath an awning of his choice, in one of nine houses of his choice, and unlike millionaire Sarah Palin, who can move back either to one of her two summer houses or go flying in her expensive airplane or take a snowmobile through the snowiest and most beautiful snowbanks of the expansive Alaskan countryside.....

Unlike these GOP con-artists, I can't afford to move to some other part of the city. Good thing that, unlike McCain and his Rovian goons, I know that 'guilt by association' is a fundamentally dishonest concept. I love living in Hyde Park. It might not be the most exciting or trendy place; it might not be all that near to CTA train routes, but doggone it, it's A-OK by me; just an ordinary, normal, everyday Joe Sixpack, doing regular-old, outside-the-beltway stuff in my humble but happy Midwestern digs. Paying my taxes, and trying to do what's right by the Lord Above.

You -- Gentle Reader -- and I know what's right: voting for Barack Obama this November.

In which I, having set out to enthuse about a new blog on the privatization of Chicago's public infrastructure, instead decry neoliberalism generally.

The following quotation is taken from the initial post of a certain Tom Tresser, whose blog is called Connecting The Dots In Chicago, which is about the privatization of public infrastructure. I am very happy to see that such a blog exists, and, although I as of yet know nothing about Tom Tresser except his initial post, I think I like his politics a lot. Tresser's blog is to be found on The Huffington Post's new Chicago-specific Web site:

[W]hat is the real state of our city finances? Is this trend toward self-financing and privatization really in the best interest of the people? Is Chicago so poor that it has to sell the Skyway and is contemplating selling Midway Airport? Is the Board of Education so strapped that parents all over the city tax themselves through never-ending fundraising in order to add staff, purchase computers and basic supplies for our public schools? Is the Park District so needy that it demands citizens to raise or find two thirds of the funding for local park improvements? Is the city so needy that it is entering into partnerships with anyone with cash or clout that strip the public out of "public assets[?]"

It's such a relief to witness the emergence of efforts like Tresser's to expose in digestible terms and with local/familiar points of reference the privatization of public assets, neoliberal politics, sleazy oligarchic alliances between government and big business.

It's my hope that the contributions of hard-working, clear-thinking and morally/ethically engaged people like Tresser, there will result an increased public consciousness of and capacity to think critically about:

1. the accumulation of facts on the ground of ongoing cynical and corrupt instances of the selling-off of public infrastructure -- which for apparently structural or market-dictated reasons don't seem to be covered under the beats of any mainstream or even formally 'public' news media I can think of,
   
2. and the ways in which the past 30 years of Republican neoliberal governance and strong-arm politics -- capitalizing on and perpetuating the latent fears of the so-called 'middle-class' -- has distorted in pernicious ways the very rhetoric that we use on a day-to-day basis to refer to a host of things economic, political and even personal. Namely, the 'logic of the marketplace' -- and its corollary, the 'our rights as consumers' -- has crept into sectors of society and human life in which it simply should have no place.

To elaborate on #2: a theory that I've seen floated (I think in an article in Slate, if memory serves, commenting upon the recent Wall Street Journal piece "Why no outrage?" by James Grant) about the lack of 'outrage' with respect to recent instances of the federal government doling out what in essence are welfare checks to corporations and wealthy investors. The author in Slate theorized that it has precisely to do with this 30 years of ideological work conducted by the GOP slogan-machine on behalf of the economic Right, including, obviously, corporate interests.

The result of this conditioning is that many of we Americans who probably lack completely either comprehension or even conscious allegiance to this neoliberal ideological agenda (and corporate profit-making agenda) associate ANY public ownership of infrastructure, no matter how big or how small, with inefficiency, ineptitude, and a kind of decline in economic dynamism, and thereby, an overall decline in the efficacy of the American project, which is, after all, built upon things like the vitality and industriousness of the atomized, private individual, acting in his own interests(!).

This GOP strategy by which public rhetoric and sentiment is conditioned against public infrastructure is, it seems to me, choc-full of weaknesses. One of the reasons we are seeing its stranglehold over the populace – and its stranglehold is greatest, let’s face it, over the ‘middle class’, broadly construed, and the ‘baby boomers’, narrowly construed – begin to unravel is because the sexy illusion that declares the privatization of all aspects of ownership and governance to be in everyone’s best interest can only sustain itself for as long as, in the main, economic prosperity continues to appear to march forward. In other words: the illusion can sustain itself only for as long as people keep their jobs and make pay that they’re happy with. The illusion is unlikely to fracture on the basis of our cognizance of other people’s declining economic status and opportunities. We have too many illusions to obscure us from that cognizance.

But, once our individual leg up begins to disappear, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid recognizing that something’s up. Private interest starts to seem in fact to stand in POSITIVE relation to public interest (a novel idea, that!). When private citizens can no longer afford to buy enough privately distributed gasoline from the privately owned gas station to drive to work everyday in their private cars, it becomes increasingly apparent that – to our shock – that the lower our private economic means, the more that the curbing of public ownership amounts to the curbing of our ability to rely on the ownership of anything at all! Without that ownership – be it public or private – we lack access to amenities and services. And without access to amenities and services, we lack the capacity to improve our quality of life.

Especially in the short-term, however, plenty of us who have been brainwashed by the GOP’s neoliberal agenda will continue to hold onto the dream, even as the dream starts to seem like more and more of a nightmare. When we lose our job, we will blame ourselves for not being hard-working enough. When gas prices become too high for us to afford, we will redirect our resentment and anger, and aim it squarely at people who look and speak differently than we do.

After all, it’s no secret that the GOP machine currently and since Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon at least, capitalizes upon the middle class’s resentment of that which is unfamiliar, and preys upon the middle class’s self-pity at the notion of having to think for so much as a moment about the interests of those who look different and live differently than it does. In other words, the resentment of the haves toward the have nots. A resentment revolving around such intangibles as fear, paranoia, historical but usually sublimated racism, and – of course – the myth of American meritocracy, with its built-in relief from having to feel guilty about how much more you have than other people. When you think about it, the fact that the GOP since Nixon was able to capitalize and perpetuate a resentment of the poor than flows from the top to bottom of the economic ladder – despite how clearly counterintuitive this would appear – is quite astonishing!

So, now, as it becomes increasingly difficult for Joe Suburb, who’d construed himself previously to be a have to ignore the fact that on a day-to-day basis, he’s more and more of a have not, the GOP will perhaps discover an ideological task for itself that on paper should be much easier than the one it’s been up to for the past 30 years. All the GOP has to do is reorganize its ideological energies around the notion that outside forces, particularly in the Middle East – tapping in, naturally to existing but mostly sublimated racism, fear and anti-Arab sentiment – is responsible for having taken the opportunities of the American middle class away! Indeed, the Right has already been at it, laying the groundwork not only for the neoconservative idea of attacking Iran, but I would argue, for the neoliberal idea that Middle Eastern oil-rich nations are, as it were, 'infringing upon the American, free-market-derived right' to buy and sell oil/gasoline at a 'fair’, price that’s not ‘artificially inflated’ by ‘evil-doers’ who look different than we do.

Again, if the GOP was able to tap into the resentment of the haves toward groups of have-nots who ‘look, talk, act and pray different than we do’, it should be fairly easy for it to redirect that resentment toward people who not only ‘look, talk, act and pray’ differently, but who live on the other side of the world, and who are portrayed as the actual culprits for the decline in the standard of living in the United States’s middle class. Oh, and by the way: ‘they’re all terrorists, and they hate our freedom’.

After all, one of the hallmarks of the aforementioned 30-year ideological project is that it undertakes to becloud the bright line that should, of course, exist between good governance and good economics. Between the public good and the good of private industry. Between democracy and capitalism! The Chinese Olympics, after all, is a kind of apotheosis of the alliance of gentlemanly economic goodwill between the USA and China that was brokered originally by Nixon and Henry 'Realpolitik' Kissinger.

At present, there is justifiable outrage on the part of activists and ordinary people globally toward China’s extensive past and continuing human rights abuses. But, do you know what I find awfully telling? The fact that you’d have to look much harder indeed to find people expressing outrage at an even more pernicious and even less containable evil: that of authoritarian capitalism. I believe that only a paranoid lunatic would suggest that any mainstream politician or business interest in the USA actually favors authoritarianism. What I am pointing to is the fact that there appears to be such an alarmingly meager amount of discussion of the ways in which the combination of authoritarianism and capitalism is a blueprint in and of itself for widespread human, political and economic injustice.

It’s easier, after all, to talk about human rights abuses – be they systemic or discrete – because it just makes more human sense as offensive to those of us who see ourselves as having a moral conscience. It functions in much the same way as the recent spate of corruption and abuse in Washington DC through alliances between federal government and private sector interests: I’m speaking of course about Jack Abramoff, et al. As Tom Frank’s new book apparently discusses (I haven’t read it yet, apart from the excerpt published in Harper’s), such lobbying/contracting/special interest abuses are SYSTEMIC in Washington. But the way business is done in DC, there are one or two ‘fall guys’ chosen from among a number of powerful participants, the ‘fall guy’ is prosecuted in a big-headline-generating, sex-scandal-type way, and life goes on, as though the whole thing was a discrete, unique, even bizarre or unusual infraction of a system that basically works.

As more and more of us begin to realize, the system of course doesn’t work. And I’m happy to see that Tresser’s blog has been set up for the purpose of addressing these tendencies on a local level, where they’re familiar and palpable. Where we ordinary Joes can trace trends and tendencies as they unfold before our eyes, in addition to taking to task on a case-by-case basis individual politicians and shady businessmen for their corruption, neglect or the deliberate creation of opacity from public scrutiny. So that we can all begin to recognize intuitively that the outsourcing of public infrastructure to the marketplace is in effect the outsourcing of democracy itself; the destruction of our rights to scrutinize, to protest, to oppose, and to vote in accordance with our beliefs, ethics and political preferences; a gag order against the use of our own voices as citizens. So that we have a shot at realizing that the outsourcing of our public infrastructure is in effect the outsourcing of the public good.

Illinois Entertainer on Smallwire's album Songs for Sleeping In

On April 30, 2008, the Illinois Entertainer published the following review of Songs for Sleeping In, the début album of Chicago band Smallwire. Entertainer reviewer Andy Argyrakis lavishes praise upon the fruits of Smallwire's labors.

Here's the review:

After opening for Tapes 'N Tapes, Chin Up Chin Up, and Magnolia Electric Co. (to name a few), melodic indie poppers Smallwire turned in the somber though sophisticated Songs For Sleeping In. Frontwoman Kristin Barendregt evokes Feist throughout the peppier premises of "Is It What You Thought?" and "Aftercast," while the dreamy backdrops of "Blur The Lines" and "Passing Plane" conjure production images of Brian Eno. (www.myspace.com/smallwire)

– Andy Argyrakis

Flavorpill Chicago on Smallwire

In early February 2008, the Web site Flavorpill Chicago published the following piece recommending a performance by the Chicago band Smallwire:

With all the sharp-eyed journos covering Chicago's variegated music scene, it's astonishing that local indie-pop purveyors Smallwire have yet to garner the fawning blog posts and laudatory column inches they so richly deserve. In many ways, though, the outfit's unsung bedroom pop — teeming with delicate keyboard tinkles, pitch-perfect harmonies, and shimmering guitar hooks — is even sweeter to hear when you know no one else is listening. Tonight, the lithe and lovely five-piece (with additional friends on viola and cello) sets up shop at the MCA's Magical Musical Showcase to perform songs off its full-length debut, the swoon-worthy Songs for Sleeping In.

- Suzanne Niemoth

Smallwire in The Chicago Sun-Times

The February 1, 2008 edition of The Chicago Sun-Times contained the following article on the Chicago band Smallwire:

Smallwire steps into MCA music spotlight
February 1, 2008

BY ALLISON AUGUSTYN

Seeing a band play an art museum might not be your first plan on a Tuesday night. But the Museum of Contemporary Art, local music venue Schubas and Chicago band Smallwire are hoping they can convince you otherwise.

The first Tuesday of every month, the MCA hosts the "Magical Musical Showcase," a performance series highlighting local bands. A nice twist on the series is that the MCA asks Chicago venues to choose which bands will play, leaving the decisions to people who know the music well.

The Feb. 5 choice fell to the popular North Side club Schubas, which is known for putting eclectic bands on-stage, so it's no surprise it would promote a band like Smallwire.

Smallwire formed in 2005, but their first CD, "Songs for Sleeping In," will be released this April on the Japanese label Moorworks. It makes sense that it would take time for the band to craft an album. Smallwire's sound draws from art-pop sensibilities, is intricate, often delicate, layered and constantly moving in different musical directions. The songs require a few listens to dig through everything going on.

"The band is more an ensemble than the traditional singer with backup and a rhythm section," said bassist/vocalist Tom Schreiner. "We think of all of the instruments and voices as pretty much equally important, write parts that interact in ways that seem to us to be both interesting and cohesive, and try to keep the sound balanced."

To complement the ensemble, Smallwire's performance will feature additional musicians on viola and cello. The band has been working on new music for the event.
"The MCA series provides us with an environment in which to work with different textures and harmonies," Schreiner said.

So with support from a known venue like Schubas and a performance stage in a place dedicated to art, Smallwire gets a chance to appeal to an audience that differs from the traditional club crowd but may be no less involved or listening. It's an intriguing combination of concepts.

Allison Augustyn is a local free-lance writer.

Newcity Chicago on Smallwire

The following recommendation and miniature album review was published by the weekly publication Newcity Chicago on January 29, 2008. It listed Smallwire's Museum of Contemporary Art performance its #1 out of five picks for the first week of February, 2008.

Tip of the Week
Smallwire
Tom Lynch

Chicago minimalist crew Smallwire's pretty, obviously titled "Songs for Sleeping In" on Moorworks is daring in its restraint and, by its very nature, humble in its presentation. The vocals from Kristin Barendregt and Kristina Dutton reach ethereal marks only found in the best of gazers and, backed by clean, quiet guitars and effortless piano and string pieces, the harmonies speak in waves. The nearly perfect arrangements are never obtrusive on the songs' melodies—and the brief and emotional string finale to "Blur the Lines" might just be the best damn thing on the album. It sounds like a beautiful drowning. The band plays as part of Schubas's Magical Musical Showcase Series at the MCA, so the show's early in the evening. Don't miss it.

Smallwire plays February 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, at 6:30pm.

(2008-01-29)