From the mouths of directors: “My work as a director has taught me the ultimate skill of juggling a dozen and a half balls at once while trying to balance two dozen and a half hats on my head” (memo from the Children’s Theatre of Western Springs).
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“There is a class of problems–and cities are one such problem–that are so complex they can only be solved through stupidity,” muses the politically incorrect Ed Zotti in Chicago Enterprise (September/October). Zotti heard Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago criticized (accurately) for ignoring race and poverty. “That said, the hard-hearted realist in us obliges us to ask: so what? I asked the UIC professor [who had made the criticism] whether he believed it would have made any practical difference if the Burnham plan had confronted the problems of race and poverty squarely. He did not have anything very definite to say. Neither do I; I can only say that it doesn’t seem very likely.”
Richard Epstein’s free lunch. Advance publicity for U. of C. economist Richard Epstein’s new book Bargaining With the State: “[The author] turns to the fair distribution of the gains from desirable government programs and the implicit peril to individual liberty and social welfare when government attaches strings to persons receiving its benefits,” such as artists or Planned Parenthood. “[He concludes that] people bargaining with the state need not always take the bitter with the sweet; they may sometimes keep the government benefit while cutting the government string.”
“Instead of lessening, the scars of 50 years ago seem to be thickening, seem to cause us to act in ways that are destructive to ourselves and each other,” writes a worried Joseph Aaron in the Jewish United Fund’s JUF News (September). “There is…too much hate between Jews about what we don’t agree on. We’re picking each other apart believing that if you support land for peace and I don’t that you’re a traitor to Israel and that if you practice your Judaism differently than I do that you’re my enemy….It’s time, I think, for us to get out from under the shadow of Auschwitz, heal the scars that have so embittered us, made us so willing to attack, so unwilling to listen….Not everyone hates us. We don’t have to hate others to feel Jewish. We are not victims. We can disagree on issues without disagreeing as Jews. The Jewish way of life is one of simcha, not burdens and fights.”
