Dropping Bombs

“Harsh”, I thought as I tossed the New York Times Book Review back on the coffee table.  Rachel Shteir’s screed about the city of Chicago didn’t get that much of a reaction out of me at the time.  But hometowns are not easily mocked, and the article has been sticking around in my head ever since, as if it were a tiny rock in my shoe.   

I don’t pay taxes in Chicago, so I can’t call myself a Chicagoan.  Nor can I argue with the litany woes she opens with: the crime, the economics, the declining population, and of course, the weather.  Her observation that the overall acceptance of graft as a part of the scenery begets characters like Rod Blagoevich is astute and valid.

One can take issue with her tone, which is better suited to an undergraduate magazine than the Times Book Review.  Haughty rancor permeates the piece.  "And yet, even as the catastrophes pile up, Chicago never ceases to boast about itself.  The Magnificent Mile!  Fabulous architecture!  The MacArthur Foundation!"  Her patronizing exclamation points give some of the city’s most stalwart attractions all the glamour of a Carnival cruise, and she skips making any case as to why these aren’t things to boast about.  But it’s okay: “Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened”, she says, making light of a world-historic calamity and dressing it up as a mordant joke. 

Shteir writes as if Chicago stands alone in its boosterism, and proceeds through the article scandalized the city is bold enough to have even a Chamber of Commerce.  “The swagger has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago,” she states at the end of the second paragraph.  She’s burying the lead, because her coming from New York is what the piece is really about.  And that is what make it so frustrating.  A critic like Shteir can write a piece like this in Times, with all the heft that that carries, and in the minds readers worldwide, she’s right.  Furthermore, the intention of the piece, far more than to talk about the books at hand, still more than to incite the umbrage of Chicago partisans, is to give her a chance to retort.  She pricks the Midwestern hacks who she knows will cry foul, so that she can say, “See, look at this response.  It is a deluded rustbelt Stonehenge, and this is the only response these people can muster.”  She'll stick it to the city, and she'll get it coming and going.

           

But such bomb-throwing doesn’t wash the other way; it’s not even tolerated.  A critic from Chicago or anywhere else couldn’t write a front-page takedown of New York City and be taken seriously.  I can’t imagine I’ll ever read a serious article about NYC and its problems that takes time to deride “Central Park! The Statue of Liberty! The Empire State Building!” 

Our culture doesn’t countenance criticism of New York. As a nation, we’re constantly given a new way to sing its praises, whether the song is by Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel or Alicia Keys (and in the case of the latter two, whether or not the song is bombastic treacle).  The embrace of New York is taken not just as a matter of course, but as a dividing line between all that is cool and urban and happening and right and all that is dismissed as “Middle America”.  A non-New Yorker makes misinformed or insensitive statement about NYC and exposes himself as a small-minded hayseed.  A New Yorker makes the same statement about anywhere else and thinks it sophisticated. 

Indeed, Shteir’s piece is small-minded.  In her initial list of the woes of “Poor Chicago”, she places the Cubs ahead of the murder rate.  In her discussion of Thomas Dyja’s book, she implicitly lauds him for escaping to The Apple, then later, nauseatingly halts her praise to chide him for dissing her alma mater.  This is not the only lapse of equanimity to be found.  One wonders why, in 1700 words on the city of Chicago, the place she’s called home for over a dozen years, not one bright – or even neutral – spot can be found.  Perhaps the answer lies in what philosophers would call her facticity – her limitations given the circumstances.  It’s hard to make a name for yourself as a writer, and so far from your betters in Manhattan!  How to free oneself from these chains?  Well, you could drop bombs on where you live and see what happens. 

To paraphrase another piece the Times ran recently: you picked the wrong town.