I‘m about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still, however small the domain of her activity, a politician she (Judy Fiske is her name) remains, and I was brought up to believe that you do not give money to politicians, unless, that is, you wish to own them.
In Chicago, where I grew up, all politicians were considered guilty until proven innocent, which, as it turned out, few were. Aldermen in the Chicago City Council in those days earned a salary of $20,000. “These guys are ready to spend a quarter of a million dollars or more for a job that pays $20,000,” my father once said, a twinkle in his eye. “Something here doesn’t quite add up, wouldn’t you say?”
Not giving money to politicians, in the Chicago of my youth, did not preclude buying them. My father did a certain amount of business at the Illinois State Fair, and to insure his doing so smoothly he “had” a politician, a state senator with the name (as best I can recall) of Dicky Neapolitano. My mother, who hadn’t the least interest in politics, was always courteous when visited round election time by our Democratic precinct captain. You could never tell, after all, when you might need the old boy to get you a special parking permit or to be excused from jury duty. “But if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.” Had Aristotle visited Chicago, his Politics might have been written differently.
Once imbued with the notion of politics Chicago-style, it is difficult to take politicians altogether seriously. Senator Dick Durbin announces his deep care for the poor, and all I can think of is how many millions he must have scoffed up from various deals put in his way by lobbyists and others during his 20 years in the Senate. I was not long ago asked to sign a petition for term limits for politicians and did so, informing the petitioner that I thought perhaps 35 minutes might be the appropriate limit for holding any political office.
My apartment in Evanston is directly across the street from Whole Foods. I cannot recall the comedian who said that if one wanted to form a Tea Party of the left the best place to start would be trolling the parking lot at Whole Foods, but he wasn’t far from wrong. Young people bearing petitions for good causes frequently work the sidewalk in front of Whole Foods. Some while ago I readily agreed to signing a petition approving gay marriage, remarking as I signed that I hoped this would insure that gays would undergo all the sufferings that heterosexuals have done during divorce. An amiable young woman wearing a Greenpeace vest recently approached me, causing me to hold up my hand and, without breaking stride, say, “Obviously you cannot tell a fascist face when you see one.” A wiseguy, a kibbitzer, a man fundamentally unserious about politics—that, I don’t mind admitting, is me.
So why did I, with tremulous fingers, write a $200 check to my local alderman, in the hope of returning her to office? To make a short story even shorter, mine begins and ends with my hearing Ms. Judy Fiske talk one evening in the living room of a neighbor who lives in our building. On that occasion she was not especially prepossessing, physically or intellectually. What was attractive about her was her obvious regard for the neighborhood we both inhabit. She has lived in Evanston for decades, as have I. She could name every building in the ward and seemed to know the history of each of them. She was immensely knowledgeable about which stores were moving in and out of the neighborhood: Barnes & Noble could soon depart, Mariano’s possibly come in.
Judy Fiske has a clear view, vision even, of what those of us who appreciate living here find so attractive about the place and why. She may be a Democrat, but her instincts, as I read them, are conservative. She wishes above all to preserve those things that make our neighborhood so amiable. She seems quite as interested in urban aesthetics as in tax-base. She has, a neighbor told me, always been on the qui vive for large chain operations attempting to pull the wool over our toes by putting up shoddy or even ugly buildings. She has also been impressively responsive to small but real problems—broken-up alleyways, truck traffic—encountered by our building. She works full time at a job that pays an annual salary of $12,784–$24,648, if you add in benefits. The word has been so tarnished by overuse in recent years that a 20-year moratorium needs to be placed on it, but the plain fact is that she cares. She is my kind of pol.
Now, my less-than-munficent check written, where the hell is a postage stamp?
