Ever since Mayor Rahm kicked off his reelection campaign, I’ve been reminded of this otherwise forgettable 1960s flick called A Guide for the Married Man.
In that movie—which I may be the only person in Chicago who remembers—Charlie, a character played by Joey Bishop, is in bed with his girlfriend when his wife walks into the room.
There and then, Charlie employs a unique strategy to escape the consequence of being caught as a philanderer. He boldly and blatantly denies, denies, denies.
“Charlie!” exclaims the wife.
“What?” says Charlie.
“What are you doing with her?”
“Who?”
“That woman?”
“What woman?”
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Why?”
And so on as Charlie and the girlfriend hop out of bed, throw on their clothes, make the bed, and walk out of the bedroom.
Eventually, Charlie’s wife—played by the always excellent Ann Morgan Guilbert—is so exasperated by her inability to get him to acknowledge what she saw with her very own eyes that she breaks down, utterly defeated, and asks what he wants for dinner.
In many ways, we, the voters of Chicago, are like Charlie’s beleaguered wife as Mayor Rahm Emanuel employs a strategy of denial in the hopes that we’ll ignore what we’ve seen with our own eyes and believe only what he tells us.
