Free speech in the 'nineties, in Oak Park IL

There for the man who owned his own darn weekly newsletter. Blithe Spirit explains itself in its inaugural issue, 3/6/96 . . .

What's This All About?

In the course of human events comes a time for declaring oneself. It's not good for man to be alone with his thoughts. He must unburden himself, or explode. Suppression, says Freud, is bad for the soul -- but he flourished in the steam age. What if he'd been a computer age baby? Would he have said garbage in, garbage out?

We'll never know. Meanwhile, allow me to unburden myself -- of thoughts large and small, largely about our community, Oak Park & River Forest, but not only that. Let chips fall.

It's an exercise in self-declaration, you might say. Good for the soul, if nothing else. And full of short paragraphs.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

Our Newspapers

Journal and Leaves, that is. Criticism will out, but it isn't personal. (He said.) Let's say it's professional. If that stretches things too much -- and a certain amount of stretching is inevitable -- let's say it's candid, forthright, straight from the shoulder. What else? Never smarmy, and I'll tell you why: (a) others might be smarmy back, (b) readers would walk away, and (c) it conflicts with my DEVOTION TO REASON.

More on that as we progress. It's the lost facility of the age. It's a loss that dwarfs that of the nickel cone or black cow. (Gene's Drug Store, Lombard & South Boulevard, 1940s)

I'm a Seneca man, you see. He and others of the ilk (Stoic, manly) will turn up here often. Like right now!

Flash! Public schools out, pricey private ones in . . .

Wall St. Journal for 3/1/96 has "leafy suburb" Conn. parents saying a pox on suburban public schools and spending big money on Kingswood-Oxford School and the like, in part because their kids aren't challenged. "Your son is doing fine. You're putting too much pressure on him," parents Bruce Johnson and Susan Boyan were told by a teacher. Ouch, said Bruce & Susan, pulling the kid.

Seneca Says . . . (a regular feature)

Seneca lived in Old Rome. He stands as one of the top disappointed teachers of all time because he thought he could make a mensch out of Nero, the very bad emperor who was the first to burn Christians systematically. Nero, he bad!

No matter. Seneca, he smart.

On anger, Seneca says never use it. It's no damn good and will get you in trouble every time. But anger puts you over the top, you say, gives you that extra something that gets people to do what you think is good for them.

Forget it, says Seneca, and you know his clincher argument, after all his harrowing references to blood and iron and warfare and suffering and misery that comes from giving into anger?

It's this, that anger is a vice and you don't do good things with vices.

Your goal is to be reasonable. Reason rules your world, remember? If you're gonna get emotional about it, forget it.

Now is Seneca a man for our age or isn't he? He's for the rule of reason, for, in our words, being reasonable.

That's what you're going to read about in these pages, the importance of being reasonable. Earnest too, but reasonable. If you ain't got that reason, it don't mean a thing, with apologies to Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington.

So. On to the next challenge.

Honky Talk . . . (another)

It's an age of heightened sensitivity. Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune is picketed for having fun with Mexican people. It's a game almost impossible to win. But the appeal is irresistible. So in hopes of better days dawning, let us listen to some Honky Talk.

Confessions of a white liberal, that sort of thing.

Like about having it up to here with Black History Month, just ended. Or some years back, hearing just enough of the Holocaust so that one more word would have set me off. Never heard that one more word, thank God.

Can't there be too much of a good thing? How about a month of St. Patrick's Days?

Christmas is vastly overdone. No wonder Jews get testy. The Zarathustrians don't like it either.

Thing is, it's so hard to do something well for a whole month. Not that I expose myself to Black history much, and here's the confession part: I swore off black history decades ago. Maybe I overdosed as a fire-breather in my 20s and 30s, when I could pick up an untoward nuance with the best of them. Look sideways at a black acquaintance in a restaurant, and I had you pegged, you racist, you.

Well, it wears thin after a while. Even before I got called a racist the first time. It's increasingly difficult not to be called one, isn't it? Look sideways and you're pegged. Boo-hoo.

School Daze . . .

Years ago I sat with a few parents and a few teachers, going over what the schools ought to emphasize. They called it strategic planning. I called it mostly nonsense but felt I ought to be there anyhow.

I suggested a manifesto of sorts: let's say the schools assert the primacy of the written word. The teachers didn't like that idea at all. Assert that primacy, and what happens to audio-visual education?

It would sink to secondary status, I would have said if I wanted to be argumentative, or if I had time to be. The two teachers, veterans of Oak Park classrooms, wouldn't hear of it. They shot back all sorts of reasons why showing movies helped. Tsk, tsk. All I wanted was to say reading comes first.

Couldn't sell it. But doesn't reading come first? The written word is at the heart of it, isn't it?

I feel the gorge rising when I remember this. It seems to sum up what's wrong with schools these days -- teachers wed to movies and videos feeling threatened by a reading-first agenda. Tsk and double-tsk.

Isn't learning how to read a lifelong learning challenge, to use a byword of the same strategic planning business? Isn't there something special about what and how you learn by reading?

Words, words, words . . .

My friend Sam says someone is not a corkscrew. Not crooked, he means. He dismisses the idea, which I hadn't brought up. We do that, planting suspicion. He meant to do it without doing it, and I accept that. I trust Sam. The guy probably is suspect. I will keep my eyes open.

Hang on to your wallet, my father would say, jokingly. Laughing, he would say it of friends. Sometimes of bona fide suspicious people. A variation was "hang on to your watch." As a kid I wondered how you would do that without calling attention to yourself, because the only watches I knew were wristwatches. We had an heirloom of sorts, my grandfather's. But watches were for wrists.

Not so the watches my father warned about. They were fobbed items. You kept them in a vest pocket and pulled them out to catch the time. It was done with a flourish, I imagine, with a flick of the wrist and a glance down -- with the right hand, I picture it -- then replaced smoothly, next to one's paunch, a sign of your prosperity.

Expensive items, these watches were for hanging on to in suspect company. A little pat on the right paunch would be enough. Nothing to call attention to itself. Ah. It's there. OK. Another, if you don't mind -- to the bartender. Now turn to your friend, elbow bent, right foot up, watch tended to.

Scotty's Friends . . .

Scotty makes friends. In Indianapolis, where he was a part-time cop, in Glasgow, where he grew up, in Mexico, where he travelled with a missionary, in Kuala Lumpur, where he ate with factory workers.

In Key West he chatted up a movie actress-restaurateur. In Oak Park he discovered exotic art from two continents, showing a native son around after half an hour on the scene.

In rural Indiana he bought a dog, going on instinct and providing a perfect home in his bachelor digs for -- yes, folks -- a Doberman.

Instinct? Did I say instinct? Scotty is fey, a second-sighted Celt to whom graves talk. He turns off roads based on emanations from God knows where -- or from God herself, who knows? He finds people where they're not supposed to be.

He's a corporate manager besides, and father of grown children. Asked if he might find room in his shop for a corporate retainer of too many years tenure, he badgers and pesters and enchants the questioner, another manager, until she asks if she can work for him -- all over the phone.

"You're African American?" he had asked. The woman, confident and even a bit brash, had said yes. He'd taken it from there, somehow weaving it into his pitch for compassion for the relative oldster, whose last name ended in a vowel.

Sandy's a man for a' that.

Sigmund's friend Carl . . .

Carl Jung wrote Sigmund Freud to say Sigmund's "technique of treating (his) pupils" was "a blunder," producing "either slavish sons or impudent puppies." Go for it, Carl.

"I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around . . . reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit . . . their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty."

Undying gratitude for telling us about this to Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode, editors of The Oxford Book of Letters, $30 and probably worth every nickel, and to a Wall St. Journal reviewer, 2/23/96.

My question: did Freud have a dirty mind?

Another: how much of our age's mewling self-absorption do we owe to Sigmund?

Readers would suggest to me a reporter, would I do an "in-depth" story? They would say it in full confidence I would know what they meant. Well. Longer, more details, an extended rather than merely suggested argument?

No merely surface treatment? O.K., if God and truth are said to reside in details. Or in the argument. Everything's an argument. It's all point-making. Not point-scoring, which is different.

Bulls score points but make them too, such as: they're the best. Was Sigmund the best?