By Michael Miner
Four days later another prominent Chicagoan who’d brought a temple down around him took center stage at the groundbreaking for the new one. E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr., CEO of the American Medical Association, spoke at a press conference called by the AMA to announce a historic reorganization. I missed the 10 AM press conference because the Fed-Exed letter announcing it didn’t get to us until 10:30. As the AMA building is across the street from the Reader, I’m not sure such a pricey courier was required.
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It seems the AMA had decided to give the next editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association the kind of insulation from busybodies that editors of other medical journals take for granted. For taking this overdue step, the AMA was claiming a place in the vanguard. A statement of “editorial governance” signed by Anderson and a battalion of other AMA dignitaries asserted that the AMA was making not just history but history that was bold and epic. “Editorial independence and journalistic responsibility continue to be hallmarks of the publications of the AMA, and insuring that valued tradition into the next millennium is of utmost importance.”
Anderson’s statement made me imagine Krause having to stand before writers he loathed and announce that Phil Jackson had just signed a new five-year contract to lead the Bulls into the 21st century. A Lincicome would have known how to squeeze that doleful moment until its pips squeaked. There’s so much attitude in Chicago’s sports pages that just looking joyous can be asking for trouble. Why, I wondered, is there no Lincicome to say what there is to say about an E. Ratcliffe Anderson? Why is there so little attitude in the rest of the paper?
Greising’s in on the secret that most people are as silly as athletes, and his tart wit has become one of the Tribune’s more reliable commodities. Sports is the only place in the daily papers that wouldn’t be helped by a little more sportswriting.
But reading an editorial isn’t witness. Going out among the fire trucks, bands, flags, crumbling shafts of granite, and rustic warriors cinched into old uniforms is. And not for the first time I considered the solemn importance of being there. Technology hasn’t advanced us to the point where we can be someplace truly if we’re merely there virtually. And as we can still be in only one place at a time, we have serious choices to make about where that place is. The honored dead that the chaplain reminded us were now at their eternal rest in far-off fields and beneath rolling waves might have interesting things to say about the choice between dying where you need to be and living where perhaps you need not to be.
