by BRUCE A. DIXON
I missed the first installment of CNN’s 8 part Chicagoland miniseries. But catching up was easy. The first few minutes of episode 2, broadly outlined its picture of Chicago, explaining that (1) the city and its schools were in deep financial trouble, mainly due to teacher pensions and pay raises; (2) Chicago’s police chief is devoted to stemming a rising tide of crime and violence; (3) that Chicago’s sports teams are what holds the city together and; (4) that the mayor’s proposed new sports stadium is a net job creator. The central figure tying every episode of Chicagoland together is Rahm Emanuel, the city’s feisty, embattled mayor, with a supporting cast that includes his police chief Garry McCarthy, the chief surgeon at what used to be called County Hospital, and Liz Dozier, the charismatic principal of a south side high school.
Chicagoland is an eight part miniseries-length campaign infomercial for Rahm Emanuel first airing a little less than a year before his mayoral re-election bid. Chicagoland is produced for the Sundance Channel by Brick City TV LLC, the same crew who did a similar “documentary” to boost Newark NJ mayor Corey Booker’s political career in 2009-2010. Chicagoland does what every commercial tries to do, sell its audience a product and/or proposition without having that audience engage in any rational thought about it. The product is Rahm Emanuel’s 2015 re-election run for mayor, and the proposition is putting happy faces on austerity, punitive policing, privatization, and “cities that work” for the wealthy and well-connected; the neoliberal vision of life in urban America.
Chicagoland makes a kind of neoliberal action hero out of Rahm Emanuel in Chicago just like the Brick City crew did Corey Booker in Newark. It treats us to scenes of the mayor picking up and mentoring apparently random black children on the west side, slow motion shots of him climbing into his armored SUV. (OK, OK, I don’t know if it’s really armored, for all I know bulletproof glass, door plates and run-flat tires aren’t technically “armor”.) Chicagoland lets us see the mayor and police chief bonding with black children in a classroom, and flashes us back to footage of Emauel at the age of 18, coming out shirtless to confront Nazis in the park. We see the mayor chilling at concerts, addressing charter school classes, and complimenting south side principal Liz Dozier. We see Emanuel’s reputation for arrogant, impolitic bluntness and profanity celebrated by President Obama, who jokes that when Emanuel lost half his middle finger in an accident it “rendered him nearly mute.”
What Chicagoland Doesn’t Show Us.
But there’s lots more that Chicagoland doesn’t show us. Soon after winning the 2011 mayoral election Rahm Emanuel had a get-acquainted dinner with Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Karen Lewis. “25% of the kids,” he told her, referring to children in the city’s public schools, “are never going to amount to anything,” and for that reason he “wouldn’t throw resources at them.”
The outraged union leader promptly made Emanuel’s words public. “Even if he does believe that,” Lewis told this reporter, “he cannot say that to me.” The mayor’s office immediately denied he’d ever said such a thing, but nobody who’s paid even passing attention to Rahm Emanuel’s abrasive, abusive style over the years believes that. This is after all, a man who when he lost half his middle finger, claims he had to learn to talk with his left hand.
Being what it is, a campaign commercial, Chicagoland plays Rahm Emanuel as an heroic figure, depicting his decision to close 49 Chicago public schools in 2013 as tough and pragmatic, based on population loss and underutilization, while it reduces the overwhelming opposition of city residents to the closings, almost all of them in black and Latino parts of the city, to incoherent background noise.
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