Like the mayor, I sometimes cite quotations.
For instance, a reader will occasionally write in, just baffled by one of my columns. What do I mean by “religion should be voluntary”? That’s craaaaa-zeeee. Maybe I could explain it to him, take his hand and walk him through it?
In such cases, I try to hurry silently on, but sometimes pause to share my favorite quote from the great dictionary writer and wit, Samuel Johnson: “Sir, I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
I can’t tell if that does anything for the reader, but it makes me feel better. And, more to the point, it is relevant, a way of saying, “The column is clear enough, bub. Figure it out. Or don’t.”
That cannot be said for Brandon Johnson’s reply when asked Monday about his firing of Chicago’s diligent health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, without the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting, or even of telling her himself on the phone. An underling did the deed, late Friday. A question was posed: What about that, Mr. Mayor?
“You can’t always go by the things that you hear. Right? ‘Real eyes realize real lies,’” Johnson replied, quoting Tupac Shakur.
So, a follow-up question: What the heck does that mean? What are you saying? That the question is premised on a lie? Then Arwady still has her job? Was she not fired? Did the mayor indeed give her the sort of respectful termination that might, oh, I don’t know, encourage another highly skilled health professional to agree to replace her? Someone the city will desperately need as COVID rates rise and God-knows-what new nightmare Hot Zone plague is at this very moment dripping out of a bat’s backside somewhere, heading to a rendezvous at O’Hare International Airport and then every block of the city of Chicago?
Such deflective mayoral wordplay bodes ill. Do you remember the last politician known for spontaneous recitations? That’s right, Rod Blagojevich. The former Illinois governor who, rather than saying what was in his heart (“I am Jesus on the cross, keeping my composure while scourged. Forgive them Father ...”), would quote some self-serving snippet of Kipling. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ...”
Blago also liked to float the last line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” — “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
I see that Blagojevich is currently striving by recording custom greetings at a few hundred bucks a pop. I received one from a reader, and a pathetic spectacle it truly was. Were I Johnson — Brandon, not Samuel — I might shudder to see myself linked arm in arm with Rod Blagojevich in some hellish poetry slam of the politically besieged.
This isn’t a minor matter. The central accusation against Johnson is that he is a puppet of the Chicago Teachers Union, which pulled the “Fire Arwady” string, and Johnson flicked her away with the jerky gracelessness of a poorly controlled marionette.
His abrupt, rude way of firing Arwady raises the possibility that he is something worse than just a puppet: a clumsy puppet, lurching to carry out CTU commands with such alacrity he forgets to apply the veneer of politeness that costs the city nothing.
The wrong of Arwady’s firing is so clear that Lori Lightfoot, like Lazarus, rolled the stone away from her political tomb and briefly walked among the living, to rightly defend the honor of Arwady as a hero. Just as you can tell things are going to go south in “Hamlet” when the dead king’s ghost haunts the ramparts of Elsinore, so Johnson should truly worry when his spectral predecessor materializes in the Sun-Times, upbraiding him.
And let’s not start in on the optics that Chicago’s mayor, in theory on the side of law and order, having just named a new police superintendent, should immediately start quoting a murdered rapper who had “Thug Life” tattooed across his stomach. Someone ought to ask Supt. Larry Snelling about that.
Although, now that he’s on the table, Tupac is a rich vein of quotes that might prove useful if the city continues to slide in the direction it’s going, while Brandon Johnson replies to legitimate questions with Blagojevichian recitation. The very first one I grabbed is this:
“We live in a war zone. We live in hell. We live in the gutter.”
Yup, gotta tuck that one away for future reference.
