It’s apparently not enough to just be a good idea. What I learned about ideas at Monday night’s session of Chicago Ideas Week is that it’s all in the presentation.
Maybe we should have slunk out together. Instead, I tried to reason with myself. Why had I been discussing Trump? Wasn’t it because he was running for president? And wasn’t the election an event? Surely my mind was average at worst! And why did I care if Trump was running for president? Because his election could spell the end of American democracy!
Among the guest speakers, I had two favorites. One was Abby Wambach, the retired soccer star. She’s cocky and proud of herself, as she should be: when she talked about equal pay for players on the men’s and women’s national teams, she reminded us that she’d won a World Cup and some Olympic gold medals, and the men haven’t won squat. But while acquiring glory she became a collection of “labels”—girl, jock, world-class jock, world-class gay jock, national heroine, national heroine with drug and drinking issues—and she wants to get past them and figure herself out as a human being. It’s not easy, not when the label mill operates 24-7.
At the end of the evening, the Chicago Children’s Choir came on for a rousing finale. Thanks to a slip-up Slaughter didn’t introduce the choir and I, for one, didn’t know who they were; but the music was what counts, and we were sent on our ways without a thought in our heads that wasn’t a heady one. I might’ve been the exception; but after I’d worked it out that it was OK to blow off the piece of wisdom Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t coin as fatuous nonsense, I felt pretty good myself.
