A SPECIAL PICK UP

10/13/11

Today’s (i.e., Thursday, 10/13/11’s) Wall Street Journal featured a page A1 article entitled “Chicago Mayor Trashes Politics of Waste Removal.” The article describes Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to make Chicago city government more efficient (See, for background, my 7/30/11 post RAHM EMANUEL IS NOT TOM DEMPSEY.) and focuses on the Mayor’s attempts to change the byzantine ward by ward system of garbage pickup in the world’s greatest city.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576612851452362670.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0

The article delves into what it implies is the archaic ward system around which delivery of city services must work. The article quotes the Mayor as saying

“The days of having trash pickup by political design only are over. It’s a culture and a mindset …of 50 years.”

Fifty years? Mayor Emanuel, having grown up in the suburbs, being a young man himself, and only becoming interested in city government and politics when the Big Job was opened up for him, perhaps doesn’t realize that the “culture and mindset” that govern how our fair city works go back a heck of a lot more than fifty years. In his defense, though, he is clearly a quick study, a good manager, and an impatient, in a good sense, man and is, so far at least, doing a great job with our city, especially for someone who parachuted in from Washington. But I digress.

My main point is that such articles, and, to a lesser extent, such television shows as the upcoming Starz series “Boss,” whet people’s interest in Chicago politics and the way things really work around here. For those who want to satisfy this curiosity, I recommend my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and its sequel, The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics. Both books use the story of Eamon DeValera Collins, a fictional old time ward heeler, to weave stories from the annals of the politics of our town into a compelling, entertaining narrative that leaves the reader with a clear sense of the way Chicago operates and an acute ability to put the hagiography of Rahm Emanuel that passes for coverage of our city in its proper context.

Both books are available at Amazon.com, various other online book sellers, and at a number of independent book stores throughout the Chicago area, most prominently Anderson’s in Naperville and Bookies’ on 103rd and Artesian in West Beverly, one of the neighborhoods that comprise Chicago’s 19th Ward.