“Today, Holden Caulfield is in his early fifties, has a beer belly, and commutes from the suburbs. The angry young women and men of Earth Day [1970]–who poured sewage on corporate carpets and pounded polluting automobiles apart with sledgehammers–are now middle-aged. The first generation with strontium 90 in its bones has parented a post-Chernobyl generation with iodine 131 in its thyroids. “Twenty years after Earth Day, those of us who set out to change the world are poised on the threshold of utter failure. Measured on virtually any scale, the world is in worse shape today than it was twenty years ago.” Denis Hayes, writing in the Amicus Journal (Spring 1990).
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How do you tell real lakefront independents from “pseudo-liberal Machine hacks” such as Edwin Eisendrath and William Marovitz? According to David Jackson in Chicago (May 1990), it’s not so much how they vote as it is their attitude toward citizen participation. He acknowledges that 43rd Ward committeeman Ann Stepan, for one, has worked effectively for merit selection of judges and school reform, and against contra aid. But then he relates a story told by former 43rd Ward alderman Martin Oberman about the time after her 1984 election. “She asked [Oberman’s] approval to stage a fund-raising carnival in the ward. When he said they should first hold a public meeting to gauge resident support, ‘she said, “I don’t know why: It’s for a legitimate cause.”‘ When, however, residents objected to the carnival in their back yards, ‘Ann got really flustered. She couldn’t speak. She got angry. And that, I think, characterizes her approach to citizen participation in ward politics,’ Oberman says.” As a result, Jackson concludes, “The New Machine, despite its good intentions, behaves very much like the old.”
Adventure travel. What does Chicago offer the international visitor? “Mary Burns [of the state Bureau of Tourism] recalls how three members of a 50-person Japanese delegation housed at the Hotel Nikko wished to see the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, who they knew as the designer of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. They spoke no English, so Burns wrote out a series of instructions in English on cards that the travelers were to hand to friendly strangers at each stop–the first to help the trio board a west-bound train on the Lake el, the next asking another anonymous Samaritan to direct them to Oak Park’s visitor center, and so on. It worked and the three returned from their adventure delighted” (Chicago Enterprise, May 1990).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
