Why do we always get historic preservation when we don’t want it? Looking for information about current “temporary” Chicago Public School structures, Jim O’Rourke found eight “Willis Wagons” lined up on the playground of the Yates School. He writes in Substance (January), “Since making this discovery and discussing it with others, Substance has learned that there are in fact other ‘Willis Wagons’ scattered across the city. Willis Wagons, which were named by Civil Rights activists in the 1960’s after Supt. Ben Willis, were used back then to segregate and overcrowd Black schools. A ‘temporary’ solution from the 1960’s is still in use.”
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Let’s see–in the cabinet we’ve got one woman, one black, one Daley … Northwestern’s Adolph Reed on identity politics (Progressive, February): “The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group’s interests feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies….That’s the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or ‘access’ while repudiating demands for an issue-based program.”
Garry Wills wrote a book about who? John Wayne, that’s who. “It is a very narrow definition of politics that would deny John Wayne political importance,” he explains. “The proof of that is Richard Nixon’s appeal to Wayne’s movie Chisum when he wanted to explain his own views on law and order. Nixon had policies, but beneath those positions were the values Wayne exemplified. All those values were created on the screen.”
