Chicagoland is an eight part mini-series-length campaign infomercial for Rahm Emanuel ..airing a little less than a year before his mayoral re-election bid. Chicagoland does what every commercial tries to do, sell its audience a product and/or proposition without having that audience engage in any rational thought about it. The product is Rahm Emanuels 2015 re-election run for mayor, and the proposition is putting happy faces on austerity, punitive policing, privatization, and “cities that work” for the wealthy and well-connected; the neoliberal vision of life in urban America. CNNs Chicagoland documentary is an 8 part wet kiss for Rahm Emanuel & neoliberalism. Black Agenda Report talked to a few real Chicagoans about what it does and doesnt show or tell, and why. They came here to make a profoundly dishonest campaign commercial for the mayor, for privatization, for neoliberalism and thats what they did. We tried to direct them to some of the facts, they wouldnt go there. Weve got a research department thats produced and pushed out to the public detailed studies of what CPS leadership under this mayor and Daley before him are and continue to do wrong, how their polices are preventing learning and promoting privatization. But in the dishonest tradition of commercials, Chicagoland fills us in on none of this. Chicagoland nimbly ignores our capacity for rational thought, aiming instead at our guts and feelings. It shifts rapidly from gritty, compelling image to image, from sports stadiums as economic development tools, to Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson & Duane Wade as token sports figures offering “inspiration” and mentoring as the answer to job and education opportunities that dont exist. It depicts implacable urban violence as an existential fact kept at bay by the thin blue line of the citys police. This vision of urban life has a name. Its called neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the problems of poverty and the poor are deemed unsolvable. The neoliberal vision calls upon us all to instead to retool and reform our individual lives, to pull ourselves up by bootstraps or whatever, seek or be role models, mentors and mentees, to adjust our expectations of society and solidarity downward and our positive attitudes upward. Thats the unspoken vision Chicagoland is selling.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 03:47:22 +0000
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