The Lies They Tell

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  And now we are ready to call it a day. The lobbying is over. We ride back to the convention center.

  A nice party is taking place here, a CUFI donor’s party. Diana says that six thousand people came to the summit this year. Where did she get the extra two thousand? Jesus might know, but I don’t.

  All in all, this CUFI organization – which many Jews think is a powerful lobby that will help them in time of need – barks, but it can’t bite.

  I’m ready to leave DC. Where should I go next? Chicago, known to some as Crook County, “is still No. 1 for public corruption,” according to Crain’s Chicago Business. I think I should go there. Let me see how politics really works.

  Gate Six

  The mayor’s office prints fake business cards to confuse the dumb press

  ON THE PLANE TO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, AMERICA’S THIRD-LARGEST CITY (THIS time I missed the Catholic call to prayer), I read the news. Here’s the BBC: “Greek MPs have approved tough economic measures required to enable an €86 billion Eurozone bailout deal to go ahead.”

  The Europeans, following the long tradition of inter-European hatred, trust the Iranians much more than they trust the Greeks and happily do their best to make the Iranians richer and the Greeks poorer.

  Brilliant.

  On the way from the airport to downtown Chicago I see signs all over in Polish. What are the Poles doing here? I don’t know. All I do know is that I like Polish food. And so I ask Siri to take me to a Polish restaurant near me.

  Siri directs me to Staropolska, the nearest along my route. Once I get there I order a brandy called Christian Brothers, in honor of the CUFI people. It’s not bad. Try it. You don’t have to convert in order to drink it.

  A young waitress, Silvia, asks me what I’d like to order. In lieu of a reply, I ask her what she thinks of the Iran deal.

  “What is that?”

  You don’t know?

  “No.”

  How long are you in the United States?

  “Five years.”

  Do you like the United States better than Poland?

  “I love Poland! Much more!”

  Then why are you here?

  “To make money.”

  As a waitress…?

  She gives me a shy Polish smile and a shake of the head in reply. Lucky me, my family is Polish and I understand. What it means is this: “I thought I’d make a lot of money here but I didn’t. I got stuck and the years just passed by. Maybe one day I’ll gather the strength to admit to myself that nothing will change and have the courage to take the first plane to my beloved Poland.”

  Yes, Polish is a complex language.

  After the meal I get myself to downtown Chicago and go to City Hall to request an interview with Mayor Rahm Emanuel for my column in the Zeit.

  • • •

  I take the elevator to the fifth floor and walk into the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Rahm is a famous man, in case you didn’t know. Prior to serving as mayor, he was White House chief of staff, senior advisor to President Obama, and a member of Congress. He is also Jewish.

  I introduce myself to the mayor’s press aide, a man by the name of Andy, and we have a little talk. The conversation goes well and he promises that he’ll try to arrange the interview for tomorrow morning. The Zeit is a major paper and it will be great for His Honor to have this opportunity to speak to Germans. Andy gives me his official business card, which has his email address on it, and asks that I shoot him an email in order to make this official. Makes total sense, and later on I send him an email.

  I try, is a better word.

  The email address that Andy gave me does not function. My email to him immediately bounces back by the City of Chicago email server with the message: “The recipient’s email address was not found.” I try again and again, but to no avail.

  All attempts to reach Andy by phone, per his phone number on the card, fail as well.

  Life.

  And life goes on.

  • • •

  Down the road from City Hall is my hotel, and next to it is a theater. I tried to suck some culture into my bones while I was with the Indians, but that didn’t work. Now that I’m with normal Americans, and they hopefully have culture to offer, I think I should grab this opportunity.

  I walk to the theater. The name of the theater is Cadillac Palace Theatre. Interesting name for a cultural organization, though I’ll probably feel more cozy in a Chevy Cruze Theater.

  Anyhow, currently playing at the Cadillac is the Broadway show Kinky Boots, with music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper. Sounds promising and I go to see it. What’s Kinky Boots about? For the most part it’s about drag queens of all kinds and sorts.

  Kinky Boots is very “American,” laden with “positive thinking,” as is evident in the closing number:

  Just be.

  Who you wanna be.

  Never let ’em tell you who you ought to be

  Just be. With dignity.

  Celebrate yourself triumphantly.

  Culturally speaking, Kinky Boots fails at almost every turn. It has as much art in it as the average Indian slot machine. But as entertainment it succeeds at almost every turn. How does it manage these two opposites? Simple: it’s a flatly written show, but Cyndi Lauper’s club music is exact, hearty, elevating, merry, smart, strong and powerful. No wonder this musical is beloved by this audience.

  The Cadillac Palace Theatre has over 2,300 seats, and practically all of them are taken at this performance. When the show ends, I go outside to watch the audience as they pile out of the Cadillac. These theatergoers are for the most part older rather than younger, more females than males, and include three blacks.

  Three.

  I walk to my hotel, the Allegro Hotel, formerly the Bismarck Hotel. Yeah, that Bismarck, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Always good to be in a place that has German history speaking to you from the walls before you go to sleep, especially in a city with a Jewish mayor.

  • • •

  Morning comes and I’m back at the mayor’s office, trying to figure out why the email address I was given does not work. At the receptionist’s desk I see a man wearing the Chicago Police Department’s uniform, obviously a cop, and he has a gun. I have to be nice.

  Could I please speak with Andy? I ask him.

  “Andy is not here.”

  Could I speak with His Highness, the mayor?

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  That’s the issue, my dear friend: I don’t know.

  “Why don’t you write Andy an email?”

  I tried, but the email address on his card is not working.

  “Could I see the card?” asks the man with the gun. I show him the card, and he looks at it. “This email address is incorrect,” he says. Good to hear this from a man with firepower.

  I go downstairs.

  At the lobby I meet another employee from the mayor’s office and I tell him the story, same story. He asks to see the business card. He looks at it and he says: “This is a fake address.”

  What should I do? I ask him.

  He points to an elevator across the hall and says: “You see that elevator? Andy just pressed the button. He’s trying to run away from you. Go fast and catch him. What he did is inappropriate.”

  I run and catch up with Andy just as the elevator doors open. Why did you give me a business card with a nonexistent, fake email address? I ask him.

  His face turns red. No journalist has ever dared to question him before. With a voice full of anger and spite he utters these words, emphasizing every syllable: “There will be no interview! I tell you right now!”

  He steps into the elevator and disappears.

  Crain’s Chicago Business was right. Chicago is No. 1 for public corruption.

  • • •

  I leave City Hall and go for a walk on Michigan Avenue, also known as the Magnificent Mile or Mag Mile. Here you can shop till you drop. Store after store offers everything you never knew you needed until you came
in. As a sign of our time, here are two shops that define our era: the Apple Store, which is partly a store and partly a shrine to our digital self-esteem, and the Under Armour store, which will sell you the underwear that will make you look trim, masculine and ever proud of the armor between your legs.

  Walk a few more steps and you’ll hit the Harley-Davidson store. “Great riders aren’t born, they’re made,” reads a digital ad at the entrance.

  How are they made? For that you need to buy a Harley. Brilliant marketing.

  Marketing, I think, is one of America’s biggest contributions to humanity, if not the biggest of them. You’ll buy anything, even a Big Mac, because you’ve been convinced that this is the best, tastiest, greatest product ever made by man.

  Chicago, at least in this area, is gorgeously beautiful. It’s cut into two parts by the Chicago River, but it is united by multiple bridges. Venice, if you wish to call it that.

  But what really makes my day here is a man by the name of Oscar, who calls himself SoulO, for he sings like a million birds. Oscar, a young black man, understands soul music and he knows how to bring out its real soul. When he schleps out the word long, rendered by him into l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-n-n-g-g-g, you can see the skyscrapers of Chicago dance to his tune, something no Apple product could ever duplicate. You see him and you fall in love with humanity.

  Tell me, Oscar, I ask him: Where in America can I find good people?

  “Go south, my man. Go south. Go to Georgia, go to Mississippi, go to Texas. The good people live there. Go south. South is the place.”

  That’s what I do in a city whose leader won’t talk to me. I talk instead to the finer of that city’s people, to a soul man with a voice.

  • • •

  There’s a sticker at the entrance to many businesses that says “No Gun.” What is this about? Over a year ago, residents tell me, the state of Illinois passed the Firearm Concealed Carry Act, which allows residents to carry a gun with them, provided it’s concealed.

  In simple language: carry your gun, but drop it on the sidewalk before you walk in through the door.

  I don’t have a gun, only a cigarette. And a cigarette is even less welcome than a gun. There are many more No Smoking signs in this city than No Gun signs.

  And so I stand on a street corner and smoke. About five puffs later a high-level Washington official, on political business in Chicago, approaches me. He is trying to quit smoking, has no cigarette on him and asks if I mind selling him a single cigarette for one dollar. I tell him to keep his money in his pocket and I give him a cigarette, and another one and then another one, and we chat in between puffs.

  I tell him what happened with Andy at the mayor’s office and he explains to me the whole nine yards of politicians and journalists. This conversation is off the record and I cannot share the name or the position of this man, only his observations.

  “The way Rahm’s press aide behaved is utterly stupid and it will come back to haunt him and the mayor because, I believe, you will write about it. That’s your obligation as a journalist. The aide should have never given you an email address that would come back to you and you’d know that it’s an invalid address. The proper way would be to give you an email address that would not bounce back and then send you a form letter or email apologizing that the mayor is not available due to a big volume of tasks and previous obligations.”

  Or arrange the interview –

  “No. You have to understand something: we don’t want to give interviews unless it’s for local media, where we know the people and we know what they will write. Otherwise, almost all of us prefer not to grant interviews to national or international media. In today’s American politics, especially after the Supreme Court decision in 2010 making it legal for donors to donate unlimited amounts to political groups, interviews carry huge risks.”

  What does an interview have to do with donors? “Everything. If you said something that you shouldn’t have said in an interview, somebody will drag it out from the newspaper and feature it in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign against you.”

  I don’t get you.

  “Because of campaign contributions you want to make sure that you don’t say anything that your donors don’t agree on, but you don’t always know what they think. The rule of thumb is: don’t give interviews when you don’t have to.”

  Is this democracy?

  “I’ll admit that it’s not. Is there freedom of expression in the country? No. Is this the honest way to deal with issues? No. This is capitalism in politics. This is the system, and this is the way things are. This is America, at least now. I don’t like the fact that today this is the way of doing politics, but I can’t change reality. Sorry. I am honest with you and I tell this to you off the record. If we had an on-the-record conversation, where you would mention my name, I would say totally different things, but they wouldn’t be true. It is what it is and it will stay this way for a long time to come. Are you surprised? Don’t be.”

  We depart. I have no doubt that this official spoke truth to me. In practical terms, for me, this means that I won’t be able to interview many politicians in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

  Too bad.

  For some time now I’ve been harboring the hope of interviewing President Barack Obama, but after what happened with Chicago’s mayor, who is President Obama’s friend, and what I just heard from the official, I realize that I shouldn’t waste my time even trying to arrange such an interview.

  But I do want to know about him, and as much as possible. Can I find his inner self by other means? The late leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, reportedly used to say: When all doors are shut, Allah opens a gate.

  And sometimes a gate means a different understanding.

  • • •

  What I would like to know is very basic: Does a man who ends up being president really care for the people who put him in office, those who gave him the power that he has?

  This would take an interview, at the end of which I would either get the answer or not.

  But, it occurs to me now, there’s another way – maybe even a better way – to get the answer to this question: meet the people who first put him in power and see how they are doing today. How are the people of his Chicago district, those who first voted for him, doing now, some fifteen years later?

  Obama started his political career as a state senator, representing Illinois’s Thirteenth District. When he was first elected, in 1996, the Thirteenth District was drawn along Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods, from Hyde Park-Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn, according to the information I have.

  Let me, I say to myself, go to that area and see how it’s doing – talk to the people and see how they fare.

  As a first step toward this goal, I go to my hotel’s front desk and ask the staff for directions. A smiling-faced lady tells me that she doesn’t know of the area I’m looking for. She needs an address, she says. I give her the boundaries of my search area again, but the smiling lady says, “I don’t understand you, but I suggest that you go to Hyde Park. If you want to experience Chicago neighborhoods, Hyde Park is a good place to visit.”

  I want south of Hyde Park, I insist.

  “How do you plan to get there? Do you have a car? Do you need a taxi?”

  I don’t want to get there by car, and I don’t want a taxi. I want to get there by public transportation. I want to meet people.

  “Take the Green Line.”

  Green line? “Yes, the Green Line. That’s the train that will take you where you’d want to go. Green. Not red.”

  Why not red?

  “The Red Line is not good.”

  Why?

  “I don’t take the Red Line, and I live in Chicago!”

  Why not the red?

  “It’s not recommended.”

  Why not?

  “It’s not safe.”

  Well, Dearborn was also not safe and I damn well enjoyed it. I take the Red Line.r />
  The train, much nicer than New York trains, moves smoothly ahead. I love this modern train: cool, new, effective. Can’t get better. I look at the people around me. And I notice a pattern: every stop more whites get off the train and more blacks get on. This goes on until all the whites are gone.

  By now the train has only black people on it. And me.

  Where is the best place to get off? I ask a man sitting next to me. He asks me what I’m looking for. The heart and soul of the people south of Hyde Park, I say to him.

  “You know where you are?”

  No.

  “South Side of Chicago.”

  Good to know. At what stop should I get off to experience the heart and soul of South Side?

  “That’s me!”

  Makes me very happy. Where do I see more people like you?

  “This is a dangerous neighborhood, man!”

  I love dangerous.

  “Get off at Sixty-Third. I’ll show you where it is.”

  He does, and then he suggests I take a bus that will take me deeper into “the ’hood.” I take the bus until its last stop. As I’m about to get off, the driver, a black guy, asks me what I’m doing here. Shouldn’t I be here? I ask him.

  “You better stay on this bus until I go back. This is not a good neighborhood. Not good. Here they have guns. They shoot here. Why are you here? Stay on this bus or take another bus out of here. There,” he says, pointing to a bus that’s about to depart, “he’s leaving. Catch him!”

  I won’t hear of it. The people here are the people in whose name Obama entered politics and they are the ones who made him. I want to see them and learn what he’s done for them.

  I get off the bus. A few people walk by. Most are black, some are Spanish. I start walking around.

  One word comes to my mind: hell.

  As I walk, all I can see is poverty staring in my face. Store after store is locked, forever shut and clearly abandoned; even churches. I walk for some time on this hottest day of the summer, stare at the poverty and despair that this place projects in a deadly gaze that never ceases, and I am shocked that this exists in the same city as the Mag Mile. I have not even encountered such images in the Third World.