Presidential election years generally cough up more than their share of political atrocities, but we would have to scour the history books to top televangelist Pat Robertson’s letter opposing an equal rights amendment in the state of Iowa.
But these national atrocity-meisters have nothing on us. This is Chicago, the city where bridges break down by springing up. We produce a whole special kind of atrocity. Take, for example:
One of the flippers was that champion of the oppressed, Alderman Luis Gutierrez, who was then rewarded by the mayor with the support of the white ethnic voting majority in the newly created “Hispanic” Fourth Congressional District, permitting the alderman to win his primary, which he would have lost if he’d had to rely on the Hispanic vote. Now, some 800 miles away as a congressman, perhaps Luis will occasionally have a fit of conscience that does not get redirected.
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Today’s What Woman? City treasurer Miriam Santos, fresh from a victory over Mayor Daley on the ethics front, quickly trivialized her own courage by posing for a cover of Today’s Chicago Woman wearing a pair of boxing gloves and a tank top. Then she demanded of her political opponents a special delegate’s seat at the Democratic National Convention to head a Hispanic delegation. How do you say chutzpah in Spanish?
Name Change? In addition to the fringe political party, whose symbol should be a cash register, a library is also named after Harold Washington. But they don’t have enough money to keep it open all the time, so now it is to be closed on Mondays. Do you suppose they’d be able to find the funds if it were named after Richard J. Daley?
She had even more answers to queries about the disposition of an inheritance that should have gone to pay part of her mother’s medicaid bill but went instead into other pockets, including her own. When Public Aid finally caught up with her, more than half of the nearly $30,000 inheritance had to be turned back to the state. When the media caught up with her she niftied that she felt as if she “had been raped.” Which the New Republic aptly compared to Clarence Thomas’s comment that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” Thomas, by the way, should be considered Braun’s most important unwitting benefactor–but he already has a patronage job.
