The Other Side of the Notepad
He goes on, “The same process can still apply. If a person calls up and says, ‘Here’s a row of buildings that are going to be torn down, and I think they’re historic,’ I’ll do the same thing I did at the Sun-Times. I’ll look into it. I’ll see what’s there and if there’s a case for saving them.”
“No matter how much one thinks one knows, you truly don’t know until you’re inside,” he says. “There are people I’ve learned were very key that I never knew existed until I got in here. People I’d say–‘Boy, if I’d known six months ago!’”
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“Deputy commissioners and assistant commissioners. People who are close to the streets and do a lot of the work.”
He won’t answer the questions he used to ask. “I think they figure Lee Bey will know the answer because of his position. And that’s true. But I just can’t talk about most of what I hear. It’s almost like being in a Twilight Zone episode. There are things I always wanted to know the answer to, and now that I know the answer I can’t write a thing. The ability to keep knowing the answers largely depends on keeping one’s mouth shut.”
“No. The fact is, he can get stuff built, which is a virtue in its own right,” says Bey. “He’s smart. He has access to capital. He knows what he’s doing.”
Roeser’s candlepower is considerable, though now and then his flame gutters. A familiar presence on Chicago’s op-ed pages as a conservative essayist comfortable with moral absolutes, he came last weekend to a subject more timeworn than perhaps he realized: the power of TV’s late-night comics to mold public opinion. Bewildered that President Bush’s standing in the polls has dipped for no reason that, so far as Roeser can see, has anything to do with his performance, Roeser found his culprits on the tube.
