Hey, Governor Jim, didja hear the one about the Czech politician? “I think a lot of Republicans look at me as an eccentric, an aberration–the king’s fool,” says west suburban Republican, Czech American, and new state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka to Jennifer Halperin in Illinois Issues (March). “What people forget is that the king’s fool used to have a major role in making policy. But he was never the one who lost his head afterward.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“There is a cultural dissonance between Newt the visionary futurist and Newt the conservative politician,” writes Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books (March 23). “This leads to bizarre oscillations between the radical and the reactionary. In Lesson Six of his television history course, he is describing beneficial changes brought about by technology. Discussing the introduction of the bicycle, he gives an idea of its impact by saying people feared it would destroy morals, carrying young people far from the supervising eye of chaperons. He cannot resist getting in a dig at the surgeon general then in office: ‘If Joycelyn Elders had been around, she would have been racing beside the bicycles handing out condoms.’ The students laughed–Elders was a butt of repeated conservative attack at the time–but in a puzzled, hesitating way. As well they might….Gingrich and the students are politically programmed to mock her for introducing changes like condoms in the schools. According to the Tofflers (Gingrich’s visionary-futurist mentors), who praise the freedom that comes not only from contraception and abortion but from genetically engineered child-planning, she should be a heroine. But Newt had dragged her in as the villain-of-the-moment where that reference made absolutely no sense at all.”
“There is a division in the African American working class that we didn’t have before,” author and activist Nelson Peery (Black Fire) tells Lew Rosenbaum in the People’s Tribune (February 13). “The black community–to the extent you can use this term–is no longer what it was in the 1930s. The relatively well-to-do black workers often do not live in the same areas as the poverty-stricken. In the 1930s, the entire black community suffered the same level of political oppression. That’s not true today.”
