Simpson Says: Bad Times Are Coming
American politics has no language of pessimism. We want to be told that there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, especially when we know it isn’t true. Former alderman Dick Simpson published a book this week that will do his political career no good. It despairs.
The book is also a look inside the mind and soul of one of the more important and intriguing figures in post-’68 Chicago politics–Simpson himself. In a lengthy autobiographical afterword, Simpson describes himself as someone who “tried to make political movements my religion because Christian churches didn’t seem to fit my needs.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
After running Eugene McCarthy’s Illinois campaign in 1968, Simpson founded the Independent Precinct Organization, “which was far more participatory than existing political parties and was the very antithesis of the Chicago machine.” As the 44th Ward alderman from ’71 to ’79, Simpson was the moral center of Richard J. Daley’s small City Council opposition and a dogged advocate of council reform, a cause that possesses him today. In his ward, he created such grass-roots bodies as the 44th Ward Assembly and the Community Zoning Board. “Neighborhood government,” he writes tartly, “was completely destroyed two years after my retirement [when] a Democratic machine alderman [Bernie Hansen] was elected to represent the ward.”
“This stuff” is a new politics distilled from Jesus, Meister Eckehart, Gandhi, and the contemporary Indian avatar Sathya Sai Baba. He’s gone down a path that will not only stupefy his poli-sci colleagues but get him into hot water in the church. “I break nearly all the creeds by the very fact I treat other teachers of compassion as important in the same sense Jesus is. Most Christians wouldn’t be willing to concede anyone having the enlightenment of Jesus.”
Salsa Static
“Do you think this is an explosive situation?” asked Jose Lamas. Probably not, we said. Despite a crank call or two hinting at violence, we suppose that if the Cuban band Orquesta Aragon comes to Grant Park in June, offended Cuban-Americans will picket peacefully, and that will be that.
Today, Special Events and such organizations as the Cuban-American Chamber of Commerce and the Cuban-American National Foundation are at such loggerheads that the entire festival is threatened. One compromise after another has been floated–adding a second, politically acceptable, Cuban band to the program; shifting Aragon to Taste of Chicago; setting up some sort of anti-Communist educational booth. But the dignity of the anguished Cuban-Americans is unnegotiable.
Besides, said Lamas, “Don’t enough people already know about this?” Politically aware Cubans know. Who else needs to? Raising more voices and tempers, said Lamas, will just aggravate a difficult situation.
