JOHN BRUMMETT: Prejudice of place

They tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again ... And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: ... Here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities."--Carl Sandburg in the poem "Chicago," published 100 years ago.

The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the world's largest permanent exhibits of Impressionist paintings.

I know because I've looked upon those works and had my appreciation imposed by a woman of great passion for whom I've held the highest regard for more than 30 years.

Major League Baseball's best record right now, I kid you not, belongs to the Chicago Cubs.

Many if not most of the world's leading comedy talents were trained at The Second City in Chicago, which is basically a school of improvisation providing Saturday Night Live's cast. A few who came from there: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, John Candy, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Gilda Radner and Martin Short.

The point--the eloquent one of Sandburg--is that there is an authentic big-shouldered greatness in Chicago even as it endures a heritage of organized crime and corrupt politics, and even as, today, its nightly gangland killing rate is the shame of this nation.

I'll tell you what Chicago reminds me of: a very big Little Rock.

My hometown has a tragic crime rate. It has an internationally infamous history on race. But Little Rock can give you a full adult dose of an enriched life.

Oh, and by the way: The University of Arkansas at Little Rock can produce academic research that is credible and worthy even though it is located in a city with a Democratic mayor and a crime problem.

I am wending my way to the powerfully revealing moment last Friday in Jonesboro at the Northeast Arkansas Politics Animals Club.

There was a debate between first-term Republican state Rep. Brandt Smith and his Democratic challenger, Nate Looney. The Democratic challenger was touting the long-term return of investment of better state funding of pre-K programs for 3- and 4-year-old poor children. He cited research about reduced subsequent incarceration rates that came from the University of Chicago.

Smith, the incumbent Republican, replied that he was not going to accept research from a town like Chicago that is a "Democratic stronghold" and is "imploding" with "chaos in the streets."

Each year U.S. News and World Report ranks the nation's universities. Most recently, the University of Chicago was in a three-way tie for fourth, with Stanford and Columbia, behind Princeton, Harvard and Yale.

I fear that Smith gave away one of the uglier under-bellied sections of contemporary American right-wing thinking.

It is a kind of know-nothingness. It rejects data without considering it. Instead it demeans research pre-emptively, purely on the basis of partisan political prejudice, stereotype and, yes, it would seem, anti-intellectualism.

Turning from prejudice against place and academia to other manifestations of myopic superficiality, Smith went on to explain that his wife takes care of his granddaughter during the day so his daughter can work, and that he works with his granddaughter on the ABCs.

"We don't want somebody else raising her," he said, as if pre-K, or even public school, was mandatory.

So should it be in all situations, he said.

He was right. If only this freshman Republican state representative could be granddaddy for everyone.

We have about 200,000 underprivileged 3- and 4-year-olds in Arkansas whose chances in life would rise dramatically with an on-site granddaddy who cared about them, took precious time with them and taught them the ABCs, even if he was a right-winger suffering from myopic superficiality on public policy.

My late daddy was an unskilled worker with a sixth-grade education. But he and my mom taught me to count and recite the ABCs well before I started school. And now look at me, pontificating for a living and holding forth about an art museum in a great, if troubled, city.

You doubt that one connects to the other?

I don't. Had I started school without a head start, and without formative attention from two trying-hard parents, and fallen behind, and despaired of school, and dropped out ... well, I can only wonder: Who'd be filling this space three days a week and writing a fourth column online?

Someone not from a Democratic stronghold with a crime problem, and thus worth reading, or so Brandt Smith is probably thinking.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/25/2016

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