Reading Algren beside the natural gas flame

Besides English professors, speechwriters are just about the only group of people left in America on whom one can rely to know, any more, who Nelson Algren is.

It was Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm that I was reading during my week off between Christmas and New Year's, in between keeping my baby girl from burning herself on the pilot light of the gas fireplace in my condominium, which is a 10-minute walk from Division Street and Milwaukee Avenue, where all the Algren action is.

As I chaffed at one more errand that reared up, on the Monday after Christmas預 visit to the current alderman of the ward that houses Algren's setting, to report a political story for a local newspaper擁t struck me that my life here in Chicago, however narrowly focused, is at least pretty well integrated.

Integrated, that is, with everything except my professional (and thanks to this blog, frequent) relationship with speechwriters who make persuasive words for saints and scoundrels alike, in business and politics both. And what about all the mercenary corporate freelancing I do to keep the low-fat bacon on the Crate & Barrell table? I'm quite sure I don't work for any scoundrels at the moment, but if someone offers me a dollar a word, I presume him innocent until he proves himself guilty.

In a scene in the Algren book, a Division Street informant is defending his trade to the Division Street hustlers upon whom he informs. "My business is everybody's business擁nformin' is a racket like everythin' else. Anythin' that pays ain't nothin' to be ashamed of, one racket's as good as the next. A man who's ashamed of his racket is a man who's ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein' broke. Get yours, Piggy-O. I'm gettin' mine. We'll go to town together."

There.

I am one.