Least appealing headline, from a recent appliance-company news release: “Honestly Now, When’s the Last Time You Cleaned Your Can Opener?”
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“What happened to [Chicagoan and soon-to-be-former Democratic National Committee chairman David] Wilhelm is an allegorical tale of Washington, in which the allegiance he offered to the president who appointed him was returned neither by Clinton nor others around him,” writes Dan Balz in the Washington Post weekly edition (August 15-21). “Not since George S. McGovern said he was ‘1,000 percent’ behind his 1972 vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, only to dump him days later, has a verbal pat on the back meant so little….[Wilhelm’s] Chicago patrons, including Mayor Richard M. Daley and brother William Daley, urged him to resign in the face of relentless sniping. He rejected that advice too, fearing it would seem disloyal to Clinton. But Clinton did little to return the loyalty to Wilhelm. Instead, he and others allowed Wilhelm to become the scapegoat for the party’s problems.”
From one architect to another. “For me, this library is all about style. And, it’s about the wrong style,” says Helmut Jahn about the Harold Washington Library in an interview in Subnation (Volume Two, Issue Ten). “It’s all about decoration. I don’t think it’s inventive….It fails on a lot of levels in terms of being a public building….A library today is about tapes and other media, not a container for the storage of books which is decorated in the way that reminds one of the past and not the future.”
