Knocks on Wood
There’s the right bad news and the wrong bad news, and Yvonne Delk has a firm opinion about which is which. Pick up “20 Years Later . . . A CITY STILL DIVIDED,” the 20th-anniversary issue of the Chicago Reporter, published by the Community Renewal Society, whose executive director is Delk. The right bad news, laid out in the article “Troubled Agency Faces Long, Hot Summer,” is that the budget of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations was cut this year by 22 percent, the chairman works part-time, and the commission is dispirited and ineffective. The wrong bad news–the news that was splashed all over television a couple of weekends ago–is that Chairman Clarence Wood has been accused of sexual harassment.
That’s what the visible evidence comes down to: certain parties, all but one unnamed, none themselves apparently harassed, saying that Wood “seemed” or “looked” to be harassing others. But that’s for the others to decide, isn’t it? Wood’s defenders say he’s an outgoing, touchy-feely kind of guy who’s being vilified by opponents in a turf battle inside the CHR.
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An official investigation doesn’t make a rumor true. Vroustouris may not know any more than the Reporter knows, or more than other reporters found out who’d tracked the rumor earlier and not done stories. But his probe transformed the landscape. We asked publisher Roy Larson how the Reporter would have played the sexual-harassment allegations if Vroustouris hadn’t come along to dignify them. “We would have touched on them,” he said.
Conscientious Rejector
A very odd political protest is being made by a tiny publisher in North Carolina. March Street Press of Greensboro prints poetry and fiction chapbooks and the semiannual magazine Parting Gifts. But out of anger and shame, March Street Press has decided to shun its own state.
Poets & Writers gave Bixby space to explain. He said that by reelecting Helms in 1990, “North Carolina sent a message to the world that freedom of artistic expression, racial equality, and tolerance for alternative lifestyles were not values to be upheld. March Street Press pondered the situation, seeking a way to express our dissent. . . . Some might argue that the [new] policy is wrong-headed, ineffective, or even insignificant, but it was a way to give our beliefs a voice.”
A lot of people we know with their heads in that larger world were happy to vote against Alan Dixon last March for slights real and imagined. Imagine if Jesse Helms represented Illinois, and every six years the state sent him triumphantly back to Washington! Empty gestures have their place. The perversity of Bixby’s at least expresses how he feels.
