WE TAKE THE BRASH VIEW

By DAVID MAMET

Sometimes you've just got to pay the other guy off, and I'm talking about Carl Sandburg.

Here we have our Literary City, birthplace and/or alma mater to Willa Cather, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, B. Traven, Algren, Bellow. Who gets to hang the tag on it? Carl Sandburg.

His poetry was a second tincture of Walt Whitman; and, finally, not good for all that much more than correcting the roll on a pool table. But when the world thinks of Chicago, does it think of Vachel Lindsay ("We were Prairie Democrats, and this was our day") or Darrow's summation in the Leopold-Loeb Trial ("...So I be written in the Book of Love")?

No. Carl Sandburg does the honors, and Chicago is "Hog Butcher for the World," and there you have it.

We can ponder New York City all day without associating it with Thomas Wolfe, and San Francisco for a month without thinking of Tony Bennett, but Chicago is the Hog Butcher and "player with railroads and nation's freight handler." Though the trains don't run, and though the hogs are gone.

But any town that claims the Cubs has got to love irony, and the progression up from farce toward what we can but hope is a cleansing, if tragic, resolution. And the Lord knows we're working toward it.

The Daley machine built the Resting Place of All Concrete--McCormick Place, world's largest convention center, out on the lake in the late '50s. It was forever in construction, and one would have thought, on its completion, that everyone's nephew had bought his boat; but lo, it opened, was inaugurated, burnt to the ground, and the construction began again, and great was the joy of the marine sales community.

Thrilling.

New York, on the other hand, with its parking-bureau scandals and clockwork rediscovery of police corruption, is merely pathetic. The Spirit of my Chicago is brash, and the hell with it. Lenny Bruce played the city in the '50s and commented, "You know, Bobby Franks was actually a snotty kid."

Chicago ran Bruce out of town, but I claim him nonetheless as having uttered one of the hippest of asides while in our boundaries. And speaking yet again of the Leopold-Loeb Trial (that first of many Trials of the Century, Chicago, 1924), I cite Chicago as Capital of the Brash, for the immortal Best Lead Ever Written by a Journalist. Boy geniuses Leopold and Loeb killed Bobby Franks, and they went to prison. Loeb was filleted in what was presumed to have been a failed homoerotic approach, and Ed Lahey, in the Daily News, led off, "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition."

And here it is convention time again. Joey Mantegna, fellow Chicagoan, sent me a T shirt, which arrived last month. It bears the logo of the Chicago police department and the legend DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION CHICAGO--1996...WE KICKED YOUR FATHER'S ASS IN 1968...WAIT 'TIL YOU SEE WHAT WE DO TO YOU!

In 1968 the Chicago police, those masters of irony, rioted. They left their vehicles, marked WE SERVE AND PROTECT, and lumbered out to beat the demonstrators into Jell-O. Hard by the northern limits of their depredation we found and find a statue of Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, famous 17th century hophead and remittance man. La Salle thought he had discovered China on that spot, and wrote to tell the folks at home.

His kindred spirits, people in similarly funny hats, are once again descending on Chicago. The conventioneers, like La Salle, are looking for something for nothing and, probably, a good time at which they cannot get caught. We welcome them.

The stunning puerility of a political convention--a circus in everything but reason, to rape Oscar Wilde--makes some sense in Chicago. For we know politics is a sham, that public officials either are or are training to be corrupt and that the Cubs will break your heart in August.

The life of a more civilized town might make the convention seem tawdry and pointless--otherwise presumably rational men and women frothing over the possibility of their particular blackguard getting in for a while. In Chicago we might philosophize that it is, more likely, the day-to-day appearance of constraint and reason that's the sham.

Tenzing and Hillary climbed Everest because it was there. That's why the cops flayed the tar out of the '68 demonstrators, and that is why we welcome back the conventioneers. We take neither the approved view nor the iconoclastic view--we know the two are harnessmates--the second isn't going anywhere the first ain't going.

We take the brash view: Welcome, Champions of Freedom. Hello, Suckers.

David Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross, about a Chicago real estate business