Flashback 2009: It won't matter, until it does

     The good news is I wrote an interesting, unusual column Thursday, related to Black History Month — if you feel reading it half as much as I felt writing it, you'll get a lot out of it. 

      And long — three times the length of a usual column.

      The bad news is that, to find that much real estate in the paper, I had to push it to Sunday. Which left me both drained and with nothing to run today.

      Thank goodness, Saturday is Valentine's Day, and I have countless Valentine's Day columns slumbering in the archive. Such as this, the bulk of which is in the form of a poem — though I would remind my slower readers that Robert Pinsky isn't coming to the Art Institute — this ran in 2009. Seventeen years ago. You missed him.

      Ron Huberman lasted less than two years as head of the Chicago Public Schools, quitting to join a private equity firm when Rich Daley announced he wouldn't run for mayor in 2011.

      The column ran when it filled a page, and I've kept the original headings in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Sometimes I'll be droning on to my wife about my day and I'll stop, suddenly realizing that I've overlooked the really interesting part.
     "Whoops," I'll say, "I buried the lede. . ." — "lede" being the opening paragraph and most important aspect of a story, which in news articles often are one and the same.
     More than a few readers, enjoying Fran Spielman's excellent profile Sunday of mayoral favorite Ron Huberman, no doubt had a similar moment when, at the end of paragraph 11, they learned that the new chief of the Chicago Public Schools is gay.
     Not so long ago, that bit of information would have been the lede, the headline and grounds for dismissal. Newspapers were forever feigning surprise that gay people not only lived among us, but held jobs — "He's a postman! And he's gay!"
     We have thankfully moved beyond that, though the implication in the story that Huberman's orientation will not matter at all isn't entirely correct either. It won't matter in the execution of his official duties. But it will matter, perhaps enormously, to some he had to deal with, particularly those who object to some action of Huberman's and are searching for what they consider a fault to bludgeon him with.
     Performance, not private life, should be the most important factor when it comes to educating our children. But it isn't always that way. I remember when local school councils were considered the solution to our perennial school crisis -- the notion that involved, engaged, vigorous parents would succeed where the bumbling bureaucrats of Pershing Road had failed.
     That was the theory. The reality was that parents can be just as misguided as paper pushers can be, and more than one outstanding principal got the bum's rush by his local school council because his racial background didn't match his student population's. Like the bureaucrats, the parents failed because they cared about the wrong thing.
     Huberman is nothing if not savvy, and his choosing this moment to go public with this open secret is no doubt part of some greater strategy ("Who accuses himself," Publilius Syrus wrote, "cannot be accused by someone else.") His opponents, trying to besmirch him, will certainly at some point invoke his sexual orientation, not realizing it is themselves they indict.

FLASH: POET TO SPEAK IN CITY!

     I could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

     Not incredulous, not curious
     As why I would miss the 5:12, the 5:25
     The 5:30, 5:50, 6:19, 6:55, and 7:35
     And pin my homeward hopes on the 8:35
     Submerge myself on the damned 8:35
     To face that train window face.
     Those green-gray faces, like moles, like drowned souls
     Nibbling on sacks of stinking fast-food fare
     Asking myself "What was the need?"
     A question from Pinsky's "Round."

     My boss, my friends, my wife, not one
     Bothered asking "Why bother?"
     It must seem a pointless task to ask
     Though I tried explaining anyway.
     You see, he translated Dante's "Inferno."
     Better than Longfellow, no mean poet
     But Henry's "renews the fear" can't touch
     "The old fear stirring."

     Plus, Valentine's Day two weeks away
     The guy behind "The Handbook of Heartbreak."
     (The title itself a poem) the man who wrote,
     "It was as if she had put me back together again
     So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me."
     About his mom

     So go, not to put on airs, since no one cares
     Go alone, to be there. "What was the need?"    

     Imagine yourself a painter of signs
     Big coffee cups splashed across bigger brick walls
     "DRINK PERK-U-UP COFFEE EVERY DAY."
     Scaffolds, ladders, turpentine
     Might you not admire a cup begot by Harnett
     His sable strand dipped in thimbles, not your broad brush
     So real you reach toward the cup, as if you could touch it
     As if, with your low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand
     You could ever grasp someone who reaches a heaven
     That's shut to you

     To paraphrase Robert Browning's poem
     About a mediocre painter justifying himself
     To a disinterested young thing with better places to go
     "How could it end in any other way?" and
     "This must suffice me here." Comforting himself
     Which I find comforting, I
     Who could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Publilius Syrus was an Assyrian writer of maxims who lived 2100 years ago. While a number of his sayings apply directly to Ron Huberman -- "You should not live one way in private, another in public" -- only one struck me as vaguely humorous:
     We are born princes, and the civilizing process makes us dogs.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2009