This is a piece I wrote sometime around 2003 when I
was working as a project manager for an environmental cleanup project outside
of Chicago and losing my mind trying to deal with the many loony personalities
in the local community of Oak Park. I had totally forgotten about it until I
found it on a storage disk, and it made me laugh to remember everything my
colleagues and I had to go through on that awful project. I was playing around
with a sort of a Dave Barry writing style back then, so I thought it would be
fun to post here.
If
you are planning a fun-filled driving tour of a lawless third-world country
where all the local drivers are self-taught, licenses and insurance are
considered silly frills, lane markings are just suggestions, and the rules of
the road are analogous with the rules of the jungle, you might want to consider
spending a week in preparation by driving around Chicago.
Although I
have experienced the joy of driving on a wide variety of roads and conditions
in and around Chicago, most of my daily Chicago driving experiences have
actually been in Oak Park, a small, rectangular suburb just west of the city. Chicago
area suburbs are required to use some combination of seven words – oak, elm,
forest, river, park, hurst, and brook – or else they cannot receive matching
funds from the state of Illinois for maintenance of their many fine roads. This
is why one avoids driving in Berwyn or Cicero.
“Suburb”
is really a misnomer because Oak Park is quite urbanized with many impoverished
neighborhoods complete with broken-down cars on the streets, a dynamic criminal
element, a flourishing drug trade, and – of course – plenty of traffic. What
sets it apart as a suburb, aside from legal incorporation, is the fact that
many of its cab drivers speak English, even if only as a second language.
Oak
Park is actually two very different places: The north is populated primarily by
wealthy white people who own big homes designed by Oak Park’s patron saint,
Frank Lloyd Wright. So loved is Frank Lloyd that the local government once
sought to officially change its name to Franklloydwrightsville, but then they
would have lost all that state money for road repairs and dog parks.
The
south is pretty much indistinguishable from Chicago or Berwyn, and most of the
people live in small homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s less successful brother,
Skippy, who was later found to have suffered from attention deficit disorder
and severe nervous twitches in his hands. Oak Park rules require that at least four
houses in south Oak Park occupy the equivalent lot size as one house in north
Oak Park.
Oak
Park was named after its many oak trees and many parks, most of which
eventually became the private yards of wealthy people in the north or were
paved over to build lovely lower-income housing in the south. In between the north and the south is a thriving
business district – despite the best efforts of the local government – in which
there are many expensive condos and town homes populated by Oak Park’s most
influential residents: wealthy white homosexuals.
Oak
Park’s town motto is (and we are not making this up) “One tree, many nuts.”
Actually,
Oak Park is a village, not a town. This change is believed to have been made
shortly after its other patron saint, Hillary Clinton, published her book about
taking villages, which I originally thought was a novel about the Vietnam
War. Imagine my surprise. I am still
curious to know who actually wrote that book, but not curious enough to waste
time reading it.
To
say that Oak Park is politically liberal is like revealing that dolphins
defecate in the water. Like liberals everywhere, Oak Parkers like to call
themselves “progressives” because it fits with their collective superiority
complex.
In
the finest liberal tradition of trying to control other people’s lives as much
as possible, Oak Park likes to regulate everything, and its village council is
always very busy making up new rules to force everyone else to conform to their
view of the world. On those rare occasions when they can’t think of something
to make a new rule about, they amuse themselves instead by sending their
bureaucratic minions out to harass restaurants and other businesses, issue
parking tickets, or count how many pets residents have.
But
the fact is that Oak Park can almost always think of something new to prohibit
or require, and they are really very creative about it. For example, by
official ordinance, it is illegal to own or carry a nuclear weapon within the
village limits (we are not making that up).
It
is also illegal to be a Republican or Libertarian, or to listen to conservative
talk radio. Oak Park even has a village-sponsored jamming device located
somewhere in the public library that is specifically tuned to prevent anyone
from getting good reception on WLS-AM, the Chicago radio station that carries
many conservative talk shows. I heard that Oak Park attempted once to make
Christian prayer illegal, but a “higher power” prevailed in thwarting that
attempt. (OK, so some of that might have been made up, but just a little.)
Oak
Park prides itself on embracing human diversity (provided none of those diverse
humans are conservative or Christian), and this is evidenced by the many black
people and many homosexuals who live there. Of course, in Oak Park, you can’t
actually say “black” or “homosexual” (you guessed it, they passed an
ordinance). In fact, the president of
the village council herself proudly pledges allegiance to a rainbow flag.
Oak
Park goes to great lengths to tout its many gay and lesbian residents because
they are mostly white and have money. This allows them to claim the diversity
mantle and act very superior while obscuring the fact that they really wish
that most of the African-American people would stay in Chicago or Berwyn. As it
is, most of the black people live in the houses designed by Skippy Wright that
are crammed onto the small lots on the south side, while homosexuals generally
live in expensive new condo developments near the business district, most of
which were happily funded by the village government in order to attract more
gays and lesbians with money.
Oak
Park is believed to be the first community in the entire nation to be
considering an ordinance requiring that all residents be homosexual. They
believe this could also help solve the “African-American problem” by
encouraging more of them to move to Chicago or Berwyn where they could remain
heterosexual.
Although
all residents of Oak Park are required to vote either Democrat or Green for
federal and state offices, the village has a variety of entertaining political parties
for its local elections with names such as the Village Managers Association, the Out Party, and the Village
Citizen’s Alliance. But by far, the most popular local party is the Entitlement Party, sometimes known also
as the Pity Party.
The
basic philosophy of this party is that they are all victims who are “owed”
something by everyone else. In their view, “someone,” such as the federal or
state government, corporations, or utility companies, should be forced (by
village ordinance, of course) to simply give them stuff. This is because they
believe they are entitled the same stuff that anyone else has, but should not
be expected to have to actually work and earn it.
Admission
to the Entitlement Party is generally
open to anyone who is not a heterosexual white male. In some cases, however,
heterosexual white males have been allowed to join the party, provided they
sign a letter asserting how much they hate themselves for their race, gender,
sexual orientation and the terrible treatment their forefathers perpetrated on
everyone else. Considering that Oak Park
will probably enact a ban on heterosexual white males soon (unless they are
officially registered as househusbands), the admission criteria may become
moot.
Because
so many of its residents chose academia over actually working for a living and
are, therefore, very well educated, Oak Park has two weekly newspapers. One
paper is called Oak Leaves and is so thick it has to be bound with
staples. The actual news content, however, can be read in approximately five
minutes. Oak Leaves is the less popular of the two papers because it is
owned by a large corporation that publishes local papers all around
Chicagoland. Due to this corporate relationship, it is largely considered to be
a pawn of the right wing and ultimately responsible for keeping Guatemalan
peasants in forced poverty and depleting the ozone layer.
The
other paper, Wednesday Journal, is one of those publications where
journalistic integrity is not just a motto, it’s an oxymoron. The Journal’s
real motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Slant.” It is edited by an avowed
socialist, and its staff is made up of “reporters” who were not good enough to
intern for a large Chicago daily or work for the Oak Leaves. At the Journal,
they never let facts get in the way of a good piece of left-wing propaganda.
Oak
Park has a very entertaining government system with numerous autonomous
entities such as the park district board and school district board, which provide
opportunities for citizens with no talent and overriding Napoleon complexes to
pretend they are actually on the village council making up all those ordinances
to control everyone else.
The park board is especially fun because everyone who gets elected believes that it
is a stepping stone to higher elected office such as the sewer commission. No one actually gets on the park board because they have an
interest in parks; they just want to pretend that they are the alternate village council and prepare for that big opportunity to move up to controlling sewers. Plus,
they feel special when they get to go into “executive session.”
One
of the most fun things to do on the park board is to feud with the village council
and to say insulting things about village trustees, which will then get printed
in one of the local papers, further heightening that board member’s renown in
the community and enhancing that person’s opportunity to make it to higher office. Each of Oak Park’s
newspapers is aligned with one of the boards; the Oak Leaves tends to side with
the village council, while the Wednesday Journal exists largely as the park district board’s “newsletter.”
But
I digress. This was supposed to be about driving in Chicago, wasn’t it?
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