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Editorial
Bullies and Liars Still Win Praise in the Shadows of Enron Collapse
By George N. Schmidt
Commentary based partly on:
John A. Byrne, Chainsaw: The notorious career
of Al Dunlap in the era of profit-at-any price (New York: Harper
Business Books, 1999), 400 pages, $26.00.
"[His] personal side was mostly protected by
himself. His carefully crafted image belied a dark and troubling side.
Not only did he have a controlling personality and a constant need to
be at the center of attention, he had a tremendous temper and an enormous
ego. And for reasons few understood, he often felt the need to either
exaggerate the experiences of his life, or simply reinvent them."
(Chainsaw, pp. 96 - 97)
"Chain Saw Paul" by Bruce Upton, edited
by Steve Forbes (Forbes magazine, April 6, 1998).
“Who says you can't restructure education the way you can restructure
business? Look at what Paul Vallas has achieved in Chicago with tough
tactics and smart publicity.” (from Forbes
April 6, 1998 article)
 Imagine if Don Baylor
began explaining how he was bringing in a new pitcher to bolster the sagging
fortunes of the Cubs. “I’ve seen him in action,” Baylor
tells the press. “He’s the stronger checking behind the net
and that’s just what we need at this point in the season...”
Or take Jerry Manuel
talking about the man they’re hiring to replace Frank Thomas for
the season. “He’s not only got a great outside shot, but he’s
as rough as anybody under the boards,” Manual says. “We also
think he can improve his free throw percentage.”
In something as important
and as American as baseball, the public wouldn’t tolerate that kind
of goofy ignorance.
But in Chicago’s
public schools — as important an American institution as baseball,
that’s what the public has been tolerating for the past seven years.
Ignorance has paraded as profundity.
What happened was,
the corporate media that tell the stories about reality for the rest of
us have been telling stories rather than reporting facts. A good nickname
— “Chainsaw Al,” “Neutron Jack,” “Kenny
Boy” — in corporate America was more important than solid work.
If things hadn’t
slipped in one part of corporate America’s mythmaking machine, Paul
Vallas would be being hailed now as “Chainsaw Paul.” It almost
happened. In April 1998, Forbes magazine was trying to offer the nickname
to Vallas, comparing Vallas favorably to the high flying head of Sunbeam
corporation. Trouble was, the “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap story was
a fake, and two months after Forbes gave the nickname to Vallas, Dunlap’s
corporation collapsed, an early Enron.
As sophisticated as
Chicago is about sports, it is unsophisticated about public education.
As a result, Chicago’s corporate, media, philanthropic, political,
and academic leaders have just finished running a six-year hoax on the
city that rivals anything that begins this essay.
Since 1995, the “business
model” for running Chicago’s public schools has been in place.
In June 1995, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley took over the school system,
appointed Paul Vallas as “Chief Executive Officer,” appointed
a hand-picked school board, and, through his press office, began to orchestrate
the public relations campaign that proclaims the successes of it all to
this day. In June 2001, Arne Duncan replaced Vallas. If anything, Duncan
was less qualified than Vallas.
Recently, however,
both the model itself and its public education extrapolations should have
given pause to thoughtful citizens.
A major Chicago story
that unfolded since January 1 was barely noticed in Chicago’s business
news pages. The business news has not been good. Amid pages of stories
about the bankruptcy of Montgomery Ward, a decline in the fortunes of
Lucent Technologies, the latest publicity stunts of Divine Interventions
(now reinvented as “Divine” something-or-other), and the lingering
collapse of the “dot-com” universe of arrogance, greed, and
computer-generated fantasies of omnipotence and unlimited wealth, another
bankruptcy was minor news. Sunbeam Corporation also went bust.
And just in time for
Christmas, there was Enron. Will the exposes of the frauds of the 90s
continue through the entire first decades of the 2000s?
The Chicago Sun-Times
devoted more than 50 column inches of copy to the public posturing of
Flip Filipowski’s “Divine” something-or-other (once the
apple of the eye of Mayor Daley’s high-tech fantasies) during January
and February 2001, but only one story to Sunbeam.
The Chicago Tribune
was less obsessed with Filipowski, Chicago’s bearded “dot-com”
poster boy, but still managed fewer than 600 words about the bankruptcy
of a company that had personified Chicago manufacturing prowess during
the decades of the Tribune’s most stunning growth and influence.
Local media scoured
the Montgomery Ward collapse for stories, histories, and personal angles.
Little or no mention was made of the quiet bankruptcy of the corporation
whose shuttered plant still sprawls across a big part of the city’s
Far West Side, a corporation whose products, made proudly in Chicago,
spanned the world in their marketing and sales during the boom years after
World War II. No one in Chicago even noted the fact that one Sunbeam product
had been promoted for more than a decade by an icon of 20th Century America.
Both the icon and the corporation were dead.
Sunbeam Corporation
filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on February 6, 2001, in United States
Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
The filing was noted
briefly in the business pages. But the city that once was home to more
Sunbeam workers than any other seemed to avert its eyes from the news
— and from the implications that could flow from an analysis of the
Sunbeam tragedy for the way news, business, public relations lies, and
public education hype have been trussed together and rolled out in one
big undifferentiated lump to Chicago’s citizens for the past decade.
If anybody in the Chicago
Board of Education’s $10 million propaganda offices noticed the Sunbeam
connection, they definitely were not talking about it. If any of the supposedly
crafty business leaders who sit on the school board faced the financial
fallout from the Sunbeam debacle (and at least two probably did), they
didn’t mention it at the February school board meeting. As far as
Chicago’s opinion makers, economic, educational, and political leaders
are concerned, the less said about the Sunbeam tragedy, the better a lot
of high-profile reputations will be.
The final lingering
death rattle of the once-mighty Sunbeam should have been piped live into
the halls of the corporate headquarters of that bizarre entity now called
“CPS”. For a few days, Sunbeam’s wheezing and gasping might
have drowned out the cliches, macho swaggering, hyperquick chatter, egomaniacal
posturing, and vapid jargon that pass for communication at 125 S. Clark
St.
The Sunbeam collapse
and its connection to the impending collapse of the hype of the past decade
in Chicago’s vast and very troubled public school system are intertwined.
When the Chicago public
education story of the 1990s is reviewed as history over the next decade,
what will unfold as the truth is pried out from beneath all the cover
ups will be a tale of greed, media manipulation, political patronage,
cooking the books, the ruthless disregard for human beings, paranoia,
police-state repression, and a mindless worship of tough talking and posturing
cowards that characterized the final decade of the 20th Century for much
of America’s white middle class. “Chainsaw Paul” will be
a start.
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