Is this what they mean when they talk about the high price of freedom? Total campaign spending for state legislative seats and statewide offices in 1994, according to the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Sunshine Project: $64.6 million. In 1998: $93.1 million.
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“I had, I thought, done nothing to prepare me to counsel a national government,” writes Michael Davis in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s “Perspectives on the Professions” (Fall) about World Bank consultant Geoffrey Dubrow’s tapping him to talk with senior Ukrainian officials about controlling corruption. “Nor did I have any other obvious special qualifications. I knew no Ukrainian–and only a few words of Russian. Most of what I knew of Ukraine, I owed to National Public Radio. How, I asked, had I been chosen? . . . He had chosen me over some I would have identified as much more qualified primarily because my experience was in Chicago, a place Ukrainians regard as sufficiently corrupt to provide analogies likely to be useful to them. In short, I owed my trip to Kiev to Al Capone.”
Gee, we’ve always thought so. Brittney Eddie of suburban Dirksen Junior High, quoted in the Openlands Project’s 1998 annual report, after taking black-and-white photographs and viewing Terry Evans’s Art Institute show “In Place of Prairie”: “Now that I have seen this, I think black and white looks better than color. It shows a lot of contrast. It changes the colors. If something is really, really dark, it will turn out black. If it is really light, it will turn out gray. I never knew about that.”
