Thursday, June 11, 1987
Chicago: An insider's view
Analysis by Charles Lieurance
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Chicago is the most incestuous of
American melting pots a place not
intended for strangers, it is where
people who are already Americans go to
celebrate the hopelessness of being
American. There is no lamp raised in
dubious welcome beside a golden door.
There are stockyards, warehouses and
packing plants. -The work of America
goes on here.
Instead of being indoctrinated into
the heartless maze of bureaucracy, the
treadmill of forms and assignments
and the metamorphosis from adults in
one culture to the children of this one;
the souls who flocked to Chicago around
the turn-of-the-century brought their
grudges with them, not their dreams.
They came to be hoods and mobsters,
to play the deep blues with electric
frankness, to beat America's ruthless
game and beat it soundly.
Their optimism, when they had any,
was the optimism of action. It was the
optimism of brutally honest expressions
of desire. An optimism represented by
worker's strikes, whiskey raids, gang
land killings, blues stoicism and the
plaintive platitude, "things gonna sure
get better, because they sure can't get
no worse."
And Chicago is of the Midwest, cut
from the same oak as our own state.
(It's an eight hour drive away.) It is a
city of high culture but its sophistica
tion is not pretentious. There's a lot to
do but you'll look good doing it in jeans.
Here people go to a Cubs game at
Wrigley Field, have a few beers and
then, without blinking an eye, go on to
a play by Chicago's own David Mamet.
Downtown there is the Lexington
Hotel, where Al Capone lived like a
king before his downfall at the hands of
Eliot Ness and the T-men. Geraldo
Rivera, working his way back to the
journalistic mailroom, ran amok through
the labyrinthine basement of the hotel
in hopes of finding money, bootleg
muscatel or improvished morgues, and
came out of the catacombs empty
handed, as most of the very level
headed population of Chicago knew he
would.
There's a huge baboon in the Mayor
Daley plaza, a mall that commemorates
the most corrupt and bestial mayor on
earth (Philadelphia's Mayor Rizzo
comes in a close second). The baboon
is Picasso's. Among the Chicago left
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Daily Nebraskan
Page 7
Eric GregoryDaily Nebraskan
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